Terms of Service

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your access to and use of Public School Match (the "Service"). By creating an account or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms and to the practices described in our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, please do not use the Service.

1. Who can use the Service

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account. The Service is intended for parents and legal guardians researching New York City public schools; it is provided from the United States and designed around NYC admissions. Children may not create accounts, sign in, or otherwise directly interact with the Service.

By adding a child's information to your account, you represent that you are the parent or legal guardian of that child, or that you are otherwise authorized to enter information about that child.

2. Your account

You are responsible for the activity that occurs under your account and for keeping your password confidential. You agree to provide accurate registration information and to keep it up to date. You can view and edit your information at any time from your account and family pages.

You can delete any child profile yourself at any time from your family pages, and that deletion takes effect immediately. To delete your entire account, contact us at any time; we will complete your request within 30 days, and if we need longer we will tell you why and when to expect completion. When data is deleted, residual copies may persist in backups and in detached storage copies for a limited period before being removed.

3. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Use your account for any purpose other than personal, non-commercial research and decision-support regarding NYC school admissions.
• Scrape, crawl, harvest, or otherwise extract data from the Service using automated means.
• Circumvent, or attempt to circumvent, the rate limits or other technical protections that apply to the Service, including its automated-access endpoints.
• Resell, redistribute, or republish match results, admissions outlook labels, the plain-language school descriptions and AI-generated school profiles we publish, or any other Service output.
• Impersonate another person or misrepresent your relationship to a child whose information you enter.
• Interfere with the security or proper operation of the Service.
• Use the Service in violation of applicable law.

Sharing features. If you invite a co-reviewer to a child's profile or share a calendar link, you are authorizing that disclosure of your own information, and you are responsible for choosing whom you share with. See our Privacy Policy, under Sharing features you control, for exactly what each sharing feature discloses.

Connecting your own AI client (remote MCP). If your plan includes our remote data connection, we grant you a personal, revocable, non-transferable license to query your own account's data and our school data through your own AI client, for your own family's school research. Access tokens are confidential: do not share them, and tell us if one is exposed. You may not use the connection for bulk extraction or redistribution of data, or to reconstruct our database or our descriptive content, including the plain-language school descriptions. We may throttle requests and may suspend or revoke tokens to protect the Service or if you violate these Terms.

4. Advertising, sponsorships, and affiliate links

Public School Match is currently ad-free. If we ever introduce advertising, these limits will apply:

• Advertising will never be targeted using child or student profile data or any sensitive information you enter.
• No school will ever pay for placement or ranking: no pay-to-rank, no pay-to-promote, and no sponsored placement of any school in search results, match results, or editorial content.
• Any advertising will be visually distinguished from school data and editorial content, and premium subscribers will not be shown advertising.

These same limits appear in our Privacy Policy. Here they are contractual commitments we make to you, not just statements of intent. For as long as you maintain a premium subscription, you will not be shown advertising.

Affiliate and referral links. We may include clearly labeled affiliate or referral links (for example, to test-preparation services), and we may earn a commission when you use them. Any such link will be clearly labeled, and affiliate relationships never affect school rankings, match results, or editorial content.

Future tiers. We may introduce additional paid tiers or services (for example, a concierge tier). Introducing a new tier will not remove features from your existing plan in the middle of a subscription period without notice.

How advertising changes take effect. If we launch advertising within the limits above, that launch does not require you to re-accept these Terms: we will give at least 30 days' advance notice and update our Privacy Policy before any advertising appears. Any weakening of the limits themselves (the commitments never to target advertising using child or student profile data, never to allow paid placement or ranking of schools, and to keep premium subscribers ad-free) would require a new version of these Terms that we ask you to accept, and would apply prospectively only.

5. Informational only, no guarantee of admission

The Service computes match scores, admissions outlook labels, commute estimates, and other guidance based on publicly available and third-party data. These outputs are informational only. They are not a prediction, promise, or guarantee of admission to any school. Admissions decisions are made by the New York City Department of Education and individual schools, not by Public School Match. You are responsible for verifying any information that is material to your decisions directly with the school or the DOE.

Three parts of the Service are produced with artificial intelligence, and each can be wrong:

• Parent Coordinator responses. Answers from our AI assistant are generated by an artificial-intelligence model, may be inaccurate or incomplete, and are not legal, educational, or professional advice. Verify anything material before relying on it.
• Plain-language school descriptions. Some school descriptions are auto-generated from school data and are labeled as auto-generated where unedited. They may contain errors; verify important details with the school or the DOE.
• Machine translations. Translations of the interface and of school content into languages other than English are produced by machine and provided for convenience. If a translation and the English version disagree, the English version of these Terms and of school content controls.

What the Parent Coordinator sends to our AI provider

When you use the Parent Coordinator, we send Anthropic your messages together with a limited summary of your family's context: your child's nickname, the grade your child is applying for and its grade group, your home school district number, your preferred boroughs and districts, the priorities you selected, the names, school codes, and fit results of the schools on your saved list, the nicknames and grades of your other children on the account, and whether your child has an IEP on file or is an English Language Learner (as yes or no indicators only). We never send your home address or any saved location, the map coordinates we derive from them, or your child's lottery number, GPA, race or ethnicity, free-or-reduced-price lunch status, or the underlying value of any other encrypted sensitive field.

6. Third-party data and content

The Service displays data from third-party sources, including the NYC Department of Education, NYC Open Data, the New York State Education Department, MySchools, and parent-submitted insights. We do not control and are not responsible for the accuracy, completeness, or timeliness of third-party data. Where we display our own analysis, transformations, or labels, we label the source and reliability of the underlying data.

Some descriptive content shown on the Service (for example, program descriptions, eligibility text, and admissions-priority descriptions) originates from third-party sources, including MySchools, and remains the property of its owners. We display it with attribution where applicable, and these Terms do not grant you any license to copy or reuse it. Map imagery and school photos from Google Maps and Street View are subject to Google's terms and are displayed with Google's required attribution.

If you find an inaccuracy, please report it using the "Report Data Issue" control on the relevant school or field. We review and respond to data issue reports as part of normal operations.

7. Your content

If you submit content to the Service, including text notes, photos, file uploads, voice recordings, and insights, you grant us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, display, and process that content in order to operate the Service, including creating transcripts and translations of it (for example, the automatic transcript of a voice memo). This license exists only so we can run the Service for you; who can see your content is described in our Privacy Policy.

Notes and media that you keep private remain private and are not shown to other users. Content on a child profile you have shared is visible to the co-reviewer you invited; if you revoke their access, they stop seeing it going forward, but you acknowledge that they may already have seen or kept copies of it while they had access. If we ever display parent-submitted insights publicly, they may be reviewed and moderated before being shown to other users.

You retain ownership of your content. You can delete your notes and media at any time, and deleting them removes them from the Service. When data is deleted, residual copies may persist in backups and in detached storage copies for a limited period before being removed.

8. Copyright complaints (DMCA)

If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, send us a notice through our takedown contact form that includes:

• Identification of the copyrighted work you claim is infringed.
• Identification of the material you claim is infringing and where it appears on the Service.
• Your name, mailing address, telephone number, and email address.
• A statement that you have a good-faith belief that the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.
• A statement, made under penalty of perjury, that the information in your notice is accurate and that you are the copyright owner or authorized to act on the owner's behalf.
• Your physical or electronic signature.

We will review complete notices and remove or disable access to material we determine to be infringing. If your content was removed and you believe the removal was a mistake or misidentification, you may send a counter-notice through the same form including identification of the removed material, a statement under penalty of perjury of your good-faith belief that the removal was in error, your contact information, and your consent to the jurisdiction of the federal courts for your address (or, if outside the United States, New York County, New York). We may restore the material unless the complaining party informs us that it has filed a court action.

We terminate the accounts of repeat infringers in appropriate circumstances.

9. Plans, billing, and refunds

The research and matching product is free: browsing schools, personalized match results, target lists, typed notes, saved events, and co-parent sharing do not require payment. Premium features (the Parent Coordinator's monthly question allotment, connecting your own AI client, note attachments such as photos, files, and voice memos, and an ad-free experience once advertising exists) require a paid subscription when paid plans are active.

• Prices. A premium subscription costs $5 per month or $20 per year, per account. One subscription covers every child profile on your account. You can also buy one-time AI boosts for $5 each, which add 50 questions to a banked balance. The prices shown at checkout control.
• Boosts. Banked boost questions never expire and are used only after your monthly allotment runs out. You can buy and spend boosts only while you have an active premium subscription; if your subscription lapses, your banked balance is preserved and becomes usable again when you resubscribe.
• Automatic renewal and cancellation. Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each monthly or annual period until you cancel. When paid plans are active, you will be able to cancel at any time online from your account's billing page; cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period, and you keep premium features until then.
• No refunds. All payments are non-refundable. Canceling stops future renewals but does not shorten the period you already paid for: whether your plan is monthly or annual, your premium access continues until the end of the current paid period, and we do not give refunds or credits for the unused portion. Boost purchases are not refundable once the questions are credited; because banked questions never expire, an unused boost is never lost. Nothing in these Terms limits any refund rights you have under applicable law.
• Price changes. We will notify you before any price increase, and the increase will take effect at your next renewal, not in the middle of a period you have already paid for.
• Free allotment. Free accounts can ask the Parent Coordinator 2 questions in total (a lifetime allotment, not a monthly one). We may change quotas and allotments over time; if we reduce them, we will give you notice first.

10. Coupons, referrals, and promotions

Coupons, promo codes, referral credits, and other promotions are subject to the terms stated when they are offered, may be limited in number or time, and may be modified or revoked in cases of abuse, fraud, or error. Promotions have no cash value except where the law requires otherwise.

11. Intellectual property

The Service, including its design, software, methodology pages, editorial content, plain-language school descriptions, and brand, is owned by us. This does not extend to the third-party content described in the Third-party data and content section, which remains the property of its owners, or to your own content, which remains yours. Some of our descriptive content is generated or drafted with the assistance of artificial intelligence and is owned and curated by us to the extent permitted by law.

Factual data points displayed by the Service (such as test scores or applicant counts) are facts and are not subject to copyright; you are free to use the facts themselves. Our editorial content (school descriptions, methodology explanations, and insights written by us) is protected by copyright and may not be copied, republished, or resold without permission.

12. Termination

We may suspend or terminate your account for a material violation of these Terms (for example, scraping, resale of Service output, impersonation, or abuse of the Service), with notice where practicable. If we terminate your account for a material violation, no refund is due. If we terminate your account for reasons other than your violation, or discontinue the Service, we will give you notice where practicable; payments already made are non-refundable except where the law requires otherwise.

You may stop using the Service, or request deletion of your account, at any time; deletion works as described in the Your account section and in our Privacy Policy. On any termination, sections of these Terms that by their nature should survive will survive, including Intellectual property, Disclaimer of warranties, Limitation of liability, Indemnification, and Governing law and disputes.

13. Disclaimer of warranties

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied. We disclaim all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any information displayed will be accurate or complete.

14. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, in no event will we be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, including lost profits, lost data, or admissions outcomes, arising out of or related to your use of the Service. Our total liability for any claim arising out of or related to the Service is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or (b) one hundred United States dollars.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain warranties or damages, so some of the limitations above may not apply to you. Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes any liability that cannot be limited or excluded under applicable law.

15. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from third-party claims, and the reasonable costs of defending them, to the extent they arise out of (a) content you upload to the Service or (b) your violation of these Terms or of applicable law. This obligation does not apply to the extent a claim arises from our own conduct.

16. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles.

Talk to us first. Before filing a claim against us, you agree to contact us with a description of the dispute and give us 30 days to try to resolve it informally. We agree to do the same before filing a claim against you.

If a dispute is not resolved informally, it will be resolved in the state or federal courts located in New York County, New York, and you consent to the jurisdiction and venue of those courts. Either party may instead bring an individual claim in small-claims court in any court of competent jurisdiction.

Time limit for claims. Except where applicable law does not permit this period to be shortened, any claim arising out of these Terms or the Service must be filed within one year after the claim arose, or it is permanently barred.

17. Consent to electronic communications

The Service is delivered electronically. You consent to receive transactional email tied to your account (for example, sign-in confirmations, billing receipts, co-reviewer invitations, and notices about these Terms or the Privacy Policy) as part of operating your account. Marketing email is governed by the preferences described in our Privacy Policy, and you can opt out of it at any time. You agree that notices we deliver electronically satisfy any requirement that a communication be in writing.

18. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. If we make material changes, we will notify you by email and in the product before the changes take effect. For changes that require your renewed agreement, we will ask you to accept the updated Terms before continuing to use your account. The date at the top of this page shows when these Terms were last revised.

19. Miscellaneous and contact

• Severability. If any provision of these Terms is found unenforceable, it will be limited or removed to the minimum extent necessary, and the rest of these Terms remain in effect.
• Entire agreement. These Terms, together with our Privacy Policy and any terms stated with a specific promotion or feature, are the entire agreement between you and us about the Service.
• Assignment. You may not assign these Terms. We may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, subject to the commitments described in our Privacy Policy.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision of these Terms, that is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.

These Terms are provided by Public School Match [Legal entity name and address to be inserted at counsel review]. Questions about these Terms? Contact us.