Terms of Service

Availa records lectures you choose to record, transcribes them, and builds notes, study questions, drafts, and tutoring from your own course material. It is a personal study tool for you, about your classes, in the same category as a voice recorder, a notebook and a tutor. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or acting on behalf of any school, and it is not a substitute for attending class, for your school’s own lecture capture, or for a disability accommodation arranged through your school.

You must be at least 18, or at least 13 and old enough to form a binding contract where you live; Availa is built for college students and is not directed at children under 13. You sign in with a Google or Apple account, and the Availa account is yours alone: you are responsible for what happens under it, and you may not share, sell, or transfer it. If you use the Service on behalf of someone else, you represent that you have their authority to accept these terms for them.

You press record; we never do. Availa does not listen to classrooms, does not decide what gets recorded, and cannot tell who is in the room. You alone decide whether to record, what to record, and what to upload. That decision comes with legal obligations that are yours.

The law. Recording another person’s speech is regulated by state and federal law, and the rules differ by state. Some states let one party to a conversation record it; others require that everyone being recorded know about the recording or agree to it. Massachusetts is one of the strictest: under M.G.L. c. 272, § 99, secretly recording anyone’s speech, meaning without their knowledge, is a crime punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine, and the person recorded can also sue for damages, punitive damages and legal fees. Knowingly disclosing or using a secretly made recording is a separate offence. California, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington, among others, also require the knowledge or consent of everyone recorded in at least some settings. This list is not exhaustive and is not legal advice. It is your job to know the law where you record.

Your school and your instructor. Almost every college also has its own rules about recording classes, and they are often stricter than the law. Many, including Boston College, prohibit recording any lecture, seminar or class discussion, and generating an AI transcript of one, without the express permission of the instructorand of the other students in the room, unless the recording is a documented accommodation arranged through the school’s disability services office. Some require that class recordings be erased at the end of the semester. Breaking these rules can be treated as academic dishonesty and referred to your school’s conduct process. Individual professors may also say no, in the syllabus or in person, and their no is final.

When the answer is no. You do not have to record anything to use Availa. Photos of your own handwritten notes, notes you type, and the files your instructor posts get the same notes, questions and study sessions a recording does. Where your instructor says no, use those instead.

What you agree to do. Before you record or upload any class, you will (a) ask your instructor for permission and record only where they have said yes; (b) follow your school’s recording policy, including any requirement to tell or get permission from classmates, and any requirement to delete recordings at the end of the semester (every lecture has a Delete control that removes its recording, transcript and notes; nothing is deleted for you automatically, so deleting on time is up to you); (c) not record where recording is prohibited, including exams, clinical or patient settings, counselling, and confidential or private conversations; (d) not record office hours, study groups, or any conversation in which the other people do not know they are being recorded; and (e) use a recording accommodation from your school where you have one, and follow its conditions. The Service shows you this reminder before your first recording and asks you to confirm it, and every Record button in the Service says that by recording you confirm your professor has given you permission. Pressing it is that confirmation, each time. It is a representation you are making to us, and to the people you record.

Your warranty. By making, uploading, or importing a recording or a transcript, you represent and warrant to Availa that you had the legal right and every permission the law, your school and your instructor required to make it and to have it transcribed, and that it does not capture a private conversation that the people in it did not know was being recorded. We rely on that representation. We do not, and cannot, verify it.

If you did not have permission. The consequences are yours, not ours. We may remove or disable the recording and everything made from it without notice, and, for repeated or serious violations, close your account without refund. You agree to the indemnity in section 9 for any claim that results, and you understand that nothing in these terms limits the rights of the people you recorded against you.

Instructors, classmates and schools. If you believe a student has recorded you or your class without the permission the law or your school requires, email matthew@availalabs.com with the subject “Recording complaint”, the course, and roughly when the recording was made. We will disable access to the recording and everything generated from it while we look into it, remove it if the student cannot show permission, and tell you what we did. We will not use a recording we know was made unlawfully. Nothing on the Service is public: recordings and transcripts are visible only to the student who made them, and are never indexed by search engines or shared with other students.

Availa can draft, edit, and explain work for your classes. Every school has its own academic integrity policy, and those policies differ on what help is allowed, from “AI tools are fine” to “any outside assistance is a violation.” You are responsible for knowing your school’s policy and for how you use anything the Service produces. Work you submit anywhere is submitted by you, as yours, at your own risk. Availa is not responsible for academic consequences of how you use it.

Transcripts, notes, answers, and drafts are generated by machine learning systems. They are usually right and sometimes wrong, and they can be wrong confidently. A transcript can misattribute who said something or mishear it entirely. Check anything that matters, especially anything you will be graded on or make a decision from. The Service is provided for study assistance, not as a source of professional advice of any kind, and nothing in it (including section 3) is legal advice.

Recordings, documents, and writing you upload remain yours, to the extent they are yours to begin with. You give us a license to host, process, transcribe, and transform that content solely to run the Service for you, including sending it to the service providers who do the transcription and AI processing on our behalf. We do not sell your content and we do not use it to train models. The license ends for content you delete, except for copies in routine backups that expire on their own schedule.

Lectures belong to the people who give them. A professor’s lecture, slides and course materials are their (or their school’s) intellectual property, and the words your classmates say in class are theirs. Recording a class you attend, with permission, for your own study is the kind of personal, non-commercial use that copyright law generally permits; distributing it is not. You may use recordings, transcripts, notes and questions produced by the Service only for your own personal, non-commercial study in that course. You may not post, publish, sell, stream, quote publicly, upload elsewhere, or otherwise distribute a recording or transcript, in whole or in part; use one to embarrass, denigrate, or take out of context an instructor or a classmate; or use the Service to build a course archive for anyone else. Where the Service lets you share study material with classmates, that sharing is limited to what the feature exposes and to people in the same class. It includes generated notes and practice questions only, never audio or transcripts, and you can turn it off for each class at any time.

You agree not to upload content you have no right to upload, and not to use the Service to harass anyone, to break the law, to infringe anyone’s rights, or to probe, scrape, overload, reverse engineer or interfere with the Service itself.

We respect the rights of instructors, authors and publishers, and we respond to notices under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. If you believe material stored on the Service infringes your copyright, send a notice containing the information required by 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3) (identification of the work, the material and its location, your contact details, a good-faith statement, a statement under penalty of perjury, and your physical or electronic signature) to our designated agent at matthew@availalabs.com, subject line “DMCA”. Content stored on the Service is private to the student who recorded it and is not published, but we will remove or disable access to material identified in a valid notice, notify the account holder, and close the accounts of repeat infringers. Knowingly false notices carry liability under 17 U.S.C. § 512(f).

Availa is a tool you choose, pay for and control. Your school has not contracted with us, does not direct what we do, and does not give us your education records. That means the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which governs how schools handle student records, applies to your school and not to Availa, and Availa is not a “school official” acting for your school. What you record and upload is your own material, protected by these terms and our Privacy Policy rather than by FERPA. We will not give your school, or anyone else, access to your account or its contents except with your permission, to act on a recording complaint as described in section 3, or when valid legal process requires it. If a school ever does engage Availa for its students, that arrangement will be under a separate written agreement and we will say so in the app.

New accounts get the full Service free for 7 days from the day the account is created, with no card. The free period is given once per person and does not renew or restart. After that, the Service costs $19.99/month, $49.99/semester, or $129.99/year, billed through Stripe. Prices can change; we will tell you before a change affects a renewal.

Subscriptions renew automatically until you cancel. You can cancel any time and keep access through the period you paid for. Payments are non-refundable except where the law requires otherwise, but if something went genuinely wrong, write to us and we will be reasonable. If a payment fails we keep processing your lectures while Stripe retries the card; if it never clears, new processing pauses but nothing you recorded is lost.

Every account has an invite link. When a friend joins through it and records their first class, that counts towards a reward (for example, a free month after a set number of friends). Rewards are applied as credit on your Stripe account, are not cash, and are reversed if the friend’s account turns out to be yours, a duplicate, or otherwise not a real new student. The reward terms shown in the app at the time you invite are the ones that apply; we may run more than one version to learn which works.

Creators, athletes and campus ambassadors can apply to be paid a commission on payments made by students they refer. Commission is earned only after a referred student’s payment clears and the refund window shown in your creator dashboard has passed; it is reversed if that payment is refunded, disputed or otherwise returned. You may not refer yourself, buy Availa through your own link, or create accounts on behalf of others. We may change commission terms for future payments, pause or end an account for breaking these terms or the platforms’ rules, and end the programme at any time; anything already approved is still paid. Payouts are made to the handle you give us and we may request tax information where the law requires it.

You must disclose that you are paid. Every post, video, story, caption or link that promotes Availa must carry a clear, conspicuous disclosure of the paid relationship (for example “#ad”, “#availapartner” or “I earn a commission”) where a viewer sees it before they act, as the FTC’s Endorsement Guides (16 CFR Part 255) and each platform’s branded-content rules require. Claims about Availa must be truthful and things you have actually experienced. When you describe Availa, do not tell anyone they can record without permission; say what we say, which is ask your professor first. A post without a disclosure, or one that misstates the recording rules, does not earn commission and can end your participation.

You can stop using Availa and delete your account whenever you want. We can suspend or close an account that violates these terms, abuses the Service, or creates legal risk for us or anyone else. If we close your account without cause, we will refund the unused portion of anything you prepaid.

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available,” without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not promise the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free, or that any output will be accurate. We make no representation that recording any particular class is lawful or permitted; that is for you to determine.

To the fullest extent the law allows, Availa is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost data, lost grades, lost opportunities, or academic discipline arising from your use of the Service. Our total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or $100, whichever is greater. Some places do not allow some of these limits, so parts of this section may not apply to you. The limits in this section are a fundamental part of the bargain between us: the price reflects them.

Indemnity. You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Availa LLC, its founders, officers, employees and contractors from any claim, demand, loss, fine or expense (including reasonable legal fees) brought by a third party, including an instructor, a classmate, a school, or a government agency, that arises from (a) a recording, upload or import you made without the permission the law, your school or your instructor required, including any claim under M.G.L. c. 272, § 99 or any other recording, privacy or publicity law; (b) your distribution of any recording, transcript or other content outside the Service; (c) content you upload that infringes anyone’s rights; (d) your violation of your school’s academic integrity or recording policies; or (e) any other breach of these terms. We will tell you promptly about any such claim and let you control its defence, provided you do not settle it in a way that binds us without our written consent.

These terms are governed by the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the Federal Arbitration Act, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. Any dispute that is not subject to arbitration under section 11 (or where that section is found not to apply) belongs exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, and you consent to their jurisdiction, unless the law where you live gives you a non-waivable right to something else.

Talk to us first. If you have a problem, email us and give us 30 days to sort it out before starting any formal proceeding. Most things get fixed this way.

Binding individual arbitration. If we cannot resolve it, you and Availa agree that any dispute, claim or controversy arising out of or relating to these terms or the Service, including whether this section applies, will be resolved by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, rather than in court. The arbitration will be conducted in English, by a single arbitrator, by video or telephone unless an in-person hearing is requested, in which case it will take place in Boston, Massachusetts or, if you prefer, the county where you live. The arbitrator may award the same individual relief a court could, and must follow these terms. We will pay the filing, administrative and arbitrator fees for any claim you bring in good faith seeking less than $10,000. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court with jurisdiction.

No class actions. You and Availa each agree that claims may be brought only in an individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, collective, consolidated or representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not consolidate claims of more than one person or preside over any form of class or representative proceeding. If this paragraph is found unenforceable as to a particular claim, that claim (and only that claim) will be decided in court under section 10, and the rest of this section still applies to everything else.

Exceptions. Either of us may bring an individual claim in small claims court if it qualifies, and either of us may seek an injunction in court to stop unauthorised use or abuse of the Service or infringement of intellectual property.

Your right to opt out. You can reject this arbitration agreement by emailing matthew@availalabs.com with the subject “Arbitration opt-out” and the email address on your account, within 30 days of first creating your account. Opting out does not affect any other part of these terms, and you can keep using the Service.

Time limit. Any claim must be filed within one year of when it arose, or it is permanently barred, to the extent the law allows.

If part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest still applies. Our failure to enforce a term is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these terms; we may assign them to a successor to the business. Sections 3, 6, 6b, 9, 10 and 11 survive if your account ends. These terms plus the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the Service.

We can update these terms as the product changes. For material changes we will notify you in the app or by email before they take effect and ask you to accept them again; continuing to use the Service after that is acceptance of the new terms. Changes to section 11 do not apply to disputes that were already pending.

Questions, complaints, refunds, recording complaints from instructors, anything: matthew@availalabs.com.