Terms of service
These terms are the agreement between you and SMC Unlimited Services, which operates Homeschool Up (“we”), for use of the website and the app. By creating an account or using the service you accept them. If you are accepting on behalf of a co-op or other organization, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.
What the service is
Homeschool Up is a planning and record-keeping tool for homeschooling. It stores the subjects you teach, the lessons in the order you teach them, the records you create, and the reports built from those records.
It is deliberately not several things. It contains no lesson content, no teaching materials and no assessments. It does not tell you what the law requires of you: the state requirements page reports figures from official sources with the date each was checked, and it is not legal advice. Nothing in the app is educational, legal or medical advice. The judgement stays yours.
Who may use it
You must be at least 18 and able to enter a contract. Homeschool Up is for the adults who homeschool: a parent, a co-parent, a tutor, a co-op leader. Children do not get accounts and must not be given yours.
Your account and your family
Keep your sign-in details private and tell us promptly at hello@homeschoolup.com if you believe someone else has access. You are responsible for what happens under your account. The owner of a family account is responsible for the people they invite to it and for removing them when they should no longer have access.
Records about children
You decide what goes in. By entering a record about a child you confirm that you have the authority to do so, whether as the child's parent or under the arrangement you have with their family, and that you will follow any rules that apply to you.
Record only what you need. There is no field for a child's address, contact detail, government identifier or health record, and you should not put those in a note or a photo. The birth date is optional and used only on the printed transcript.
Your content, sequences and files
You keep ownership of everything you enter and upload. You grant us only the permission needed to store it, display it back to you and the members of your family, back it up and provide the service.
When you build or import a sequence, enter only names, numbers and short labels you have the right to use. Do not upload copyrighted lesson materials, manuals or passages. Work samples you upload must be your child's own work or something you have the right to keep. Third-party curriculum names are the property of their respective owners. Homeschool Up is an independent planning and record-keeping tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by those publishers or organizations.
A sequence you share to the library is offered to other families under a permission to copy and adapt it for their own homeschool. Share only what is yours to share.
Plans, trials and billing
Choosing a plan
After setup, a new account chooses the Family plan or a Co-op plan before it records anything. Every plan has every feature; the plans differ only in how many children they hold and who can be invited.
The trial
Every plan starts with a 15-day free trial that requires a payment card. Nothing is charged during the trial. One trial per person; we keep a record of addresses and of payment cards that have used one so the offer is not taken repeatedly, and a trial started with a card that has already had one ends before it begins.
The Family plan and the Co-op plans
The Family plan covers up to 5 children. The Co-op plans are sold in bands by number of children. Adding a child past your band moves the plan up to the next band at the price shown before you save, prorated and charged from that day. Reducing the roster does not change the current period; the plan moves down at the next renewal to the band the roster then needs.
Referral passes
Someone who joins through your referral link receives 30 days of the Family plan at no charge once they have recorded a first lesson, and you receive 14 days at the same moment. One pass per person: an address that has had one, in any spelling, gets no second. Passes stack only to a fixed limit, carry no cash value, and end when a paid plan begins. We may withdraw a pass obtained by creating accounts for the purpose of earning it, including where the same payment card is used on both accounts.
Renewal
At the end of the trial the card is charged for the billing period you chose, monthly or yearly, and the subscription renews automatically at the then-current price until you cancel. Prices are in US dollars and exclude any tax that applies where you are.
Cancelling
Cancel at any time from Plan and billing. Cancel during the trial and nothing is charged. Cancel afterwards and access continues to the end of the period you have already paid for. We do not refund part-used periods except where the law requires it, and we would rather you cancelled early than paid for something you are not using.
What happens after
Your records are not deleted when a subscription ends. They stay readable and exportable. A family whose trial or plan has ended may keep one child on a free plan at no charge, with every feature; printed reports on it carry a short Homeschool Up line. With more live children than that, the account is read-only until you choose a plan or keep one child. The free seat is for the life of the account: archiving or deleting that child does not make room for another. We may change what the free plan includes; we will not take features away from an existing free account without telling you first.
Price changes
We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice by email before a change affects your renewal.
Acceptable use
Do not:
- Try to reach data that is not yours, or probe, scan or disrupt the service.
- Share an account between people who should have their own, or resell access.
- Upload material you do not have the right to, or anything unlawful.
- Use automated means to extract data at scale, or attempt to rebuild the service from it.
- Enter a child's sensitive personal information, as described above.
Suspension and termination
You can delete your account at any time from Settings, which removes the family and its records and cancels any subscription. We may suspend or end an account that breaks these terms or puts other users at risk. Unless the breach makes it impossible, we will tell you first and give you a chance to export your records.
Availability
We work to keep the service running and take backups, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error free, and we may change or retire features. If we ever discontinue the service we will give reasonable notice and time to export. Export your records regularly if they matter to you, and keep your own copy of anything you must produce for a school district or an evaluator.
Disclaimers and liability
The service is provided as is, without warranties of any kind to the extent the law allows. We are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential losses, or for lost profits, lost data or lost goodwill. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.
Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, you keep the rights your local law gives you.
Privacy
How we handle information is set out in the privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.
Co-ops and organizations
When a co-op, tutor or other organization uses Homeschool Up for the families it serves, the records its members enter about children are handled only on the organization's instructions, as its service provider. In practice that means:
- We use those records only to provide the service. They are never sold, never used for advertising, never used to profile a child, and never used to train machine learning models.
- Children do not get accounts and are never contacted by us. Everything about a child is entered by an adult.
- Our processors (the database and file storage, hosting, payments and error monitoring, listed in the privacy policy) are bound by written terms at least as protective as these, and we stay responsible for them.
- The organization can export every record it owns at any time, on any plan.
- Within 30 days of a written request, or of the account closing, we delete the organization's records from the live database; encrypted backups age out on their own shortly after.
- If we learn of unauthorised access to those records, we tell the organization without undue delay, with what we know and what we are doing about it.
- We will help the organization answer a parent's request to see or correct their child's record, and we refer any request that reaches us directly back to the organization.
An organization that needs a signed data processing agreement can write to hello@homeschoolup.com and we will sign one on these terms.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the law of the State of Illinois, United States, without regard to its conflict of law rules. Any dispute that cannot be settled by writing to us is brought in the state and federal courts located in Lake County, Illinois, and both sides accept that venue. If you are a consumer, nothing in this section takes away protections or venue rights the law of your home country or state gives you.
Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. The date at the top changes, and material changes are announced in the app or by email before they take effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the new version.
Contact
SMC Unlimited Services, 555 N Sheridan Rd, Lake Forest, IL 60045, United States