Terms of service
These terms are an agreement between you and BCHAN Studio LLC ("BeiStar", "we", "us") covering the BeiStar Chinese app and beistar.app (together, the "service"). By creating an account or using the service, you agree to them. If you don't agree, don't use the service.
Our privacy policy explains what information we collect and how we handle it. It is part of these terms.
1. Who can use BeiStar
You must be at least 13 years old to create your own account. If you are between 13 and 17, you may only use the service with a parent's or guardian's permission, and by using it you confirm you have that permission.
Children under 13 may use the service only through a class-card seat issued by a school (see section 6). They may not create their own accounts.
If you use BeiStar on behalf of a school or organization, you confirm you have the authority to bind it to these terms, and "you" includes that organization.
2. Your account
Keep your email address current and your password to yourself. You are responsible for what happens under your account. If you think someone else has gotten into it, tell us at support@beistar.app.
You can delete your account at any time in Settings. Deletion is immediate and permanent, as described in the privacy policy.
3. Your license to use BeiStar
We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use the app and its content for your own learning. That is the whole grant: you may not sell, rent, redistribute, or publicly perform the service or its content, and you may not use it to build a competing product or dataset.
4. Pro subscriptions
Some content and features require a BeiStar Pro subscription, offered monthly or yearly and purchased through the Apple App Store or Google Play.
- Auto-renewal. Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each period unless you cancel at least 24 hours before the period ends. Your store account is charged for renewal within 24 hours before the new period starts.
- Managing and canceling. You manage and cancel the subscription in your App Store or Google Play account settings, not inside the app. Deleting the app does not cancel a subscription. Canceling stops future renewals; you keep Pro until the current period ends.
- Price changes. If a subscription price changes, the store will notify you under its own rules before you are charged the new price, and where the store requires it, will ask for your consent.
- Refunds. Payment is handled by Apple and Google, so refunds follow their policies and are requested through them.
- Free tier. The free tier of BeiStar exists on its own merits and is not supported by advertising; there are no ads anywhere in the service.
School-purchased seats are billed to the school under a separate agreement, not through in-app purchase.
5. Acceptable use
Don't:
- break the law, or use the service to harm anyone;
- share, resell, or publicly redistribute content from the service;
- circumvent content gating, payment, or access controls;
- probe, overload, scrape, or interfere with our servers;
- reverse engineer the app, except where the law gives you that right regardless of this term;
- misrepresent who you are to us or to a school.
We may suspend or close accounts that violate these terms.
6. School and classroom accounts
Schools can buy batches of class-card seats and hand them to students. For those seats:
- the seat belongs to the school, which can revoke, rotate, or reassign it at any time;
- the school's agreement with us governs billing and administration, and if it conflicts with these terms for a school-managed seat, the school agreement wins;
- teachers in the classroom can view students' display names, seat numbers, and learning progress, as described in the privacy policy;
- the in-app account deletion option does not apply; the seat is closed by the school.
7. Content and intellectual property
The service's original content, including its stories (such as 佳怡的东游记), lessons, exercises, translations, annotations, commentary, recorded audio, artwork, and software, belongs to BCHAN Studio LLC or its licensors and is protected by copyright and other laws.
Classical Chinese texts featured in the service, such as Tang and Song poems and excerpts from classic novels, are in the public domain. Our rewrites, translations, annotations, readings, and presentations of them are not; those are our original work.
The service also includes third-party materials used under their own licenses, including dictionary data, character stroke data, fonts, and sound effects. Their licenses and credits are listed in the app under Settings, and those licenses govern that material.
Nothing in these terms transfers any ownership to you, and nothing limits rights you have in public-domain texts obtained elsewhere.
8. What you send us
Anything you submit through the service, including practice answers, survey responses, difficulty ratings, and suggestions, may be used by us to operate, study, and improve the service. You keep any rights you have in what you write; you give us a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free license to use it for those purposes. We do not publish your practice answers.
If you email us an idea or suggestion, we may use it without obligation to you.
9. Availability and changes to the service
We are a small team building BeiStar actively. Features will change, content will be added and sometimes removed or reorganized, and the service may occasionally be unavailable. We may change or discontinue any part of the service, though if we ever discontinue paid functionality you have already paid for, the store's refund rules apply.
10. Disclaimers
The service is provided "as is" and "as available", without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. BeiStar is an educational tool; we don't promise any particular learning outcome, exam result, or level of availability. Some jurisdictions don't allow certain warranty disclaimers, so parts of this section may not apply to you.
11. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent the law allows, BCHAN Studio LLC will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits or data, arising from your use of the service. Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the greater of fifty dollars (US $50) or the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose.
Some jurisdictions, including California for its consumers, do not allow certain limitations of liability, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law.
12. Termination
You can stop using the service or delete your account at any time. We can suspend or terminate your access if you materially violate these terms, and where practical we will tell you why. Sections 7, 8, 10, 11, and 14 survive termination.
13. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms as the service evolves. The current version always lives at this page with its effective date. For material changes we will notify you in the app before they take effect, and continuing to use the service after that is acceptance of the new terms. If you don't accept them, stop using the service and delete your account.
14. Governing law and disputes
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-law rules. Before filing any claim, contact us at support@beistar.app; most issues can be sorted out informally. Any dispute that can't be will be resolved in the state or federal courts located in California, and both sides consent to their jurisdiction. If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest remains in effect.
15. If you downloaded the app from Apple
These terms are between you and BCHAN Studio LLC, not Apple. Apple has no obligation to provide maintenance or support for the app, is not responsible for handling any claims relating to it (including product liability, legal compliance, and intellectual property claims), and is a third-party beneficiary of these terms with the right to enforce them against you. You confirm you are not in a country under a U.S. government embargo and are not on any U.S. government list of prohibited or restricted parties.
Contact
BCHAN Studio LLC
support@beistar.app
beistar.app