Terms of Service

What changed

• 2026-07-08: precision pass across Terms and Privacy (wording clarifications; no substantive changes).
• 2026-07-31: corrected and completed the processor list (analytics, AI routing, webhook delivery), completed the cookie and storage inventory, added the non-arbitration, deterministic-rewards and AI-audio clauses, and did a plain-language pass in all three languages.
• 2026-08-12: analytics became strictly opt-in with a verified deletion leg at the analytics provider, teacher sharing is now fully disclosed in the Privacy Policy, voice consent became versioned and revocable in Settings, consent record-keeping and the storage inventory were completed, ownership claims were split by origin, and a full open-source notices file was published.
• 2026-09-25: AI-powered features (essay and speaking evaluation, the AI tutor, the public AI tools) became available to users aged 18 and over only, with a one-time age confirmation before the first use; the account age floor stays 16.

1. Who can use YoluBand

You must be at least 16 years old to create a YoluBand account. By creating an account you confirm that you are 16 or older and that the information you provide (display name, email address, date of birth, learning goals) is accurate.

If you are 16 or 17, you confirm that your parent or guardian is aware of and permits your use of the service. When the birth date you enter at sign-up falls in that range, we show you this confirmation as part of accepting these Terms and record that you gave it. Where the law requires parental or guardian consent for a person of your age (in particular for any future paid features), we will ask for that consent before the relevant feature can be used.

AI-powered features — essay and speaking evaluation, the AI tutor and the public AI tools — send the text you submit to an AI provider and are available to users aged 18 and over. Before the first use we ask you to confirm that you are 18 or older and record that confirmation. An account whose date of birth shows 16 or 17 cannot use these features; everything else in the service remains available to it.

2. Your account

You are responsible for your own account.

• Keep your password and any sign-in credentials confidential.
• Do not share your account or let someone else sign in as you.
• If you suspect someone else has accessed your account, write to hello@yoluband.az and we will help you secure it.
• We may suspend or close accounts that violate these Terms; in serious cases, without prior notice, to the extent permitted by law.

3. Acceptable use

When you use YoluBand you agree not to:

• Copy, scrape, or redistribute our lesson content, passages, audio, or grading prompts for use outside YoluBand.
• Use bots, automated scripts, or other automated means to access the service, complete lessons, or generate grading.
• Circumvent rate limits, account-tier restrictions, or (when they launch) paywalls.
• Submit content that is unlawful, hateful, threatening, sexually explicit, infringes another person's rights, or is intended to harass other users.
• Probe, scan, or attempt to break the security of the service, or interfere with another user's enjoyment of it.

We may remove content and suspend accounts that breach these rules, acting reasonably and in line with your mandatory consumer rights.

4. Free and paid features

YoluBand offers a free tier that includes the core learning path, mini-games, stories, the friends layer, and a generous allowance of practice. Some features (for example IELTS-format mock tests, AI essay grading, speaking grading, the AI tutor, and certain advanced practice modes) may in the future require a paid subscription or one-time package. Rewards inside YoluBand (XP, gems, streak shields, referral bonuses) always follow from your own actions under published rules; we run no chance-based draws or lotteries.

Paid features are not active yet. At the date of this version YoluBand is a free service and no payments are taken. The following applies only when paid tiers launch, and will be presented to you again at that time:

• Prices are shown in Azerbaijani manat (AZN), inclusive of any applicable taxes, before you pay.
• Subscriptions renew automatically for successive periods until you cancel. We will tell you the price and renewal date before you are charged, send you a reminder before each renewal, and let you cancel at any time from your account settings; cancellation stops future renewals.
• Refunds and your right of withdrawal are described in our Refund Policy (/legal/refunds) and governed by the mandatory consumer-protection law that applies to you.
• Free-tier usage may be subject to fair-use rate limits, particularly for AI-graded features that have a per-request cost to us.
• We will give you at least 30 days' notice of material changes to prices or tier contents.

5. Intellectual property and your content

Rights in the materials you see in YoluBand fall into four groups.

• Materials our team creates — the software, the brand, lesson content, passages, prompts, audio direction, and the Yolu mascot: the copyright in these is ours.
• Materials we license from third parties: these stay their owners' property and we use them under the licence granted to us. Where a licence requires attribution, we show it with the material and on our Attributions page.
• Materials made with AI assistance where a person on our team did the substantial authoring — choosing, structuring, writing and editing the result: we treat these as our own authored works.
• Output generated purely by AI, with no substantial human authoring: we do not claim authorship copyright in it. We claim only the rights the law actually gives us — in the selection and arrangement of the collection, in the database, and under these Terms — and the acceptable-use rules in §3 apply to it in the same way.

Using YoluBand gives you a personal, non-transferable licence to use the service for your own learning, not ownership of any of these materials.

You retain ownership of the content you create inside YoluBand: essays you write, speaking responses you record, study notes you save. By submitting that content you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free licence to store it, display it back to you, send it to our AI processors for the purpose of grading and feedback, and use anonymised versions to improve our product. We may sublicense it only to those providers, and only so that they can run the service for us.

That licence lasts as long as the content is on your account. It ends when you delete the content or your account, with two exceptions that cannot be undone: anonymised improvements we had already made, and processing our providers had already completed (see Privacy Policy §5). We do not use your essays or your voice recordings to train our own or public AI models. Our AI processors handle submitted content under their own terms; Privacy Policy §4 contains an important disclosure about Google's free-tier services.

If you believe content in YoluBand infringes rights you own or represent, write to hello@yoluband.az with the URL of the material and a description of the issue; we review every such notice and remove infringing material where justified.

6. AI-generated feedback

Many of YoluBand's grading and feedback features rely on large-language-model providers (such as Google Gemini) and speech services, and the listening audio in our lessons is generated with AI text-to-speech voices rather than recorded by human speakers. AI grading is fast and useful, but it is not perfect:

• AI-generated band scores are practice estimates, not certified results, and are not official IELTS, TOEFL, or SAT results.
• AI-generated explanations, sample answers, and rewrites may occasionally contain errors.
• AI-generated feedback is a study aid, not official examination advice, and you should not rely on it as a substitute for professional guidance or an official test.

If you spot a grading mistake, please report it to hello@yoluband.az.

7. No guarantee of exam outcomes; independence from exam authorities

YoluBand is designed to help you prepare for English exams, including IELTS. We do not guarantee any particular band score, certificate result, university admission, or job outcome. Your actual exam score depends on many factors outside our control.

YoluBand is an independent product. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by the British Council, IDP: IELTS Australia, Cambridge Assessment English, ETS, the College Board, or any other examination authority. "IELTS", "TOEFL", "SAT", and other exam names are registered trademarks of their respective owners and are referenced here only descriptively, to indicate the exam formats that some of our practice features are designed around. All practice content is written by our team or generated by AI in publicly-known exam formats and is not drawn from official examinations or official preparation materials.

8. Service availability

We work hard to keep YoluBand available, but the service is provided "as is" and "as available." We do not promise uninterrupted access and may take parts of the service offline for maintenance, security work, or upgrades, and may change, add, or remove features. For free-tier users in particular, certain AI-graded features may be temporarily unavailable when we reach usage limits with our underlying providers. Nothing in this section affects rights you have under mandatory law.

9. Termination

You can stop using YoluBand at any time. To delete your account and the personal data associated with it, use the Delete account control in Settings, or write to privacy@yoluband.az from the email tied to your account.

We may suspend or close your account if you breach these Terms, if your account creates legal or safety risks for us or other users, or if we have to stop operating in your jurisdiction.

Outside an emergency — fraud, a security risk, unlawful conduct, or a threat of imminent harm — we will tell you the reason first and give you a fair chance to reply or appeal by writing to hello@yoluband.az, and we will read what you send before the closure becomes final. Where it is safe to do so, we let you export your data before the account is closed. Closing an account does not remove any refund right you have by law; the Refund Policy continues to apply.

10. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, YoluBand and its team are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss of profits, revenue, data, or opportunity arising from your use of (or inability to use) the service. Where liability cannot be excluded by law, our total liability to you for any claim relating to the service is limited to the greater of (a) the amount you have paid us in the twelve months before the claim and (b) 50 AZN.

Nothing in these Terms limits or excludes any liability that cannot be limited or excluded under applicable law: liability for intent or gross negligence, liability for harm caused to life or health, and your mandatory rights as a consumer.

11. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of Azerbaijan, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute that cannot first be resolved by writing to hello@yoluband.az shall be brought before the competent courts of Baku, Azerbaijan, unless mandatory consumer-protection or procedural law gives you the right to sue in another court. As a consumer, this includes the right to bring your claim before the court of your own place of residence. These Terms contain no arbitration clause: consumer disputes are resolved in the courts, as Azerbaijani law provides. If you are a consumer based in another country, this clause does not deprive you of any protection you have under the mandatory consumer-protection law of the country where you live.

12. General provisions

• Severability. If any provision of these Terms is found invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions stay in full force, and the invalid provision is replaced by a valid one that comes closest to its intent.
• Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, Cookie Policy, and Refund Policy, are the entire agreement between you and us about the service and supersede any earlier communications.
• Assignment. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms to anyone else. We may assign these Terms (including to the limited liability company being registered to operate YoluBand) provided your rights are not reduced by the assignment; we will announce such an assignment through an in-app notice.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce a provision, that is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later.
• Force majeure. Neither party is liable for delay or failure caused by events beyond its reasonable control (natural disasters, war, internet-infrastructure failures, acts of authorities), provided the affected party resumes performance as soon as reasonably possible.

13. Changes and contact

We may update these Terms from time to time. The date at the top is the effective date of the current version. We announce material changes through an in-app notice or email. The notice asks you to accept the new version and stays until you do; the app is not locked while it is shown, so you keep your access either way. If you do not agree with the new version, stop using the service — the deletion route in §9 remains open to you. Questions about these Terms? Write to hello@yoluband.az.