Last updated: 2026-08-30
Applies to: the Trace website and application at https://trace.school, including the Agent Builder, lessons and labs, the school portal, and the Trace SDK.
Contact: [email protected]
1. Agreement#
By creating an account or otherwise using Trace, you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use Trace.
Two other documents are part of this agreement: the Privacy Policy and the Cookie Policy.
If you use Trace through a school, its accepted Data Processing Agreement and any signed pilot or district agreement take precedence over conflicting Terms for the students and staff they cover.
2. The service#
Trace teaches students about AI through lessons, quizzes, labs, and building agents. Teachers create classes, assign material, and review submitted work. The Trace SDK provides programmatic access to approved models.
Trace does not calculate mastery scores, grades, or judgments about a student's ability. Teachers review the submitted work.
Plans have limits on lessons, classes, students, and monthly agent credits. Runs have caps on tokens, steps, tool calls, and cost. We may adjust these limits, but will notify you before materially reducing a plan you have already paid for.
3. Eligibility#
You must be at least 13 years old to create a Trace account on your own, and you confirm that you meet that requirement by signing up.
A student under 13 may use Trace only through a school that has created a class for them and supplied the school authorization required by law. Their sign-up must carry a valid, school-issued invitation token; independent under-13 accounts are not created. A school taking this route confirms that it has authority to consent on behalf of parents for school-directed educational use, and that it has met the parental notice requirements its own policies and applicable law impose.
If you register as a teacher or a school administrator, you confirm that you teach or work at a school or educational program and that you have permission to use Trace with your students.
4. Your account#
You are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping your sign-in details private. Registration information must be truthful. Tell us at [email protected] if you think someone else is using your account.
Sign-in is handled by WorkOS; your password is held there and never by us. School administrators are responsible for the teacher seats they add and remove.
5. Acceptable use#
Use Trace for learning and teaching. Do not:
Prohibited content
- Anything unlawful under applicable law
- Child sexual abuse material or any content that sexualizes or exploits a minor
- Content that infringes intellectual property, privacy, or publicity rights
- Content that harasses, threatens, or demeans a person or group, or promotes violence or self-harm
- Someone else's personal information typed into a lesson, project, or prompt
Prohibited behavior
- Getting around class, project, or sharing permissions, or accessing another person's work or account
- Probing, scanning, or attacking the service, or attempting to bypass model, tool, rate, or spending limits
- Scraping, crawling, or automating access beyond ordinary use of the app and the documented SDK
- Reverse engineering, decompiling, or jailbreaking the service or its safety systems
- Copying, scraping, or redistributing Trace's lesson content outside your own classroom use, or reselling access to Trace
- Using Trace to complete schoolwork for another subject in violation of your school's academic honesty policy
- Using Trace to make high-risk automated decisions about people
Teachers supervise their students' use of Trace in class.
Enforcement. We may investigate suspected violations, rate-limit or block sessions, and suspend or close accounts. Where a school account is involved we contact the school first, unless doing so would make the situation unsafe.
6. Your content#
Your work is yours. Students own the projects they build and the text they write. Teachers own the classes, assignments, and materials they create. We claim no ownership.
License. You grant Trace Education a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide license to store, display, and process your content solely to operate the service. This includes displaying work to you, your teacher, or people you share it with, and sending prompts to model providers. The license ends when the content is removed, subject to the retention described in the Privacy Policy.
No training. We do not use your content to train, fine-tune, or improve AI models, ours or anyone else's, and every request we send to a model carries a zero-retention instruction to the provider.
Your warranty. You confirm you have the right to submit what you submit, and that doing so does not violate anyone else's rights or the law.
7. Generated output#
You own it. We claim no ownership of what a model produces in your project or conversation, and you may use it for any lawful purpose, including commercially.
You are responsible for checking it. Before relying on, publishing, or handing in AI output, you are responsible for verifying that it is accurate, that it does not infringe a third party's trademark, copyright, or likeness rights, and that using it complies with your school's policies.
Copyright is unsettled. In the United States and several other jurisdictions, material generated by an AI model without sufficient human authorship may not qualify for copyright protection. A model may also reproduce or closely echo material from its training data. We make no representation that output is original or protectable.
We run a limited safety review before showing a final reply. Two automated reviewers check only the proposed final assistant reply for specific categories of harmful, school-inappropriate, or cheating-enabling content. One flag can withhold it, and Trace also withholds it when the safety service is unavailable. This is not a quality, accuracy, copyright, or factual review, and it does not mean Trace approves the output.
8. AI disclaimer#
Output on Trace is produced by probabilistic AI models. It may be inaccurate, incomplete, biased, outdated, or entirely invented, and it may contradict itself between runs of the same prompt. Any audio produced by a text-to-speech model is synthetic and is not a recording of a real person.
Verify AI output before relying on it. We are not liable for decisions made on the basis of AI output.
9. Third-party services#
Trace uses third-party services whose terms apply alongside these Terms.
Model routing. Prompts are sent to OpenRouter (terms, privacy), which routes each request to the provider serving the model chosen. Approved final replies also cause two GPT-5.6 Luna safety-review requests through OpenRouter; each contains only the privacy-redacted proposed reply. The models on our allowlist today are developed by Alibaba (Qwen3 ASR Flash), DeepSeek (DeepSeek V4 Flash), Xiaomi (MiMo 2.5), OpenAI (GPT-5.6 Luna, text-embedding-3-small), and Hexgrad (Kokoro 82M). Each model's page on openrouter.ai names the serving provider and its data policy. We may add, remove, or replace models at our discretion, including for privacy or safety reasons.
Other services. Identity and authentication run through WorkOS (privacy). Subscription billing and payments run through Stripe (privacy), using hosted Stripe Checkout and the Customer Portal. Meetings booked at /contact/meeting run through Cal.com (privacy). Consent-gated product analytics run through PostHog (privacy). The full list, with what each one touches, is at Subprocessors.
For schools. Trace acts as a processor and a FERPA school official for school accounts. The Data Processing Agreement, the subprocessor list, and change notification are all available and are referenced in §1.
10. Plans, payment, and billing#
Trace offers free and paid plans. Current prices and limits are published at https://trace.school/pricing.
How billing works. Subscriptions are billed through Stripe. Trace never receives or stores your card number. Paid plans renew automatically for the period you selected until you cancel. Cancel from account billing at any time; access continues to the end of the period you have paid for, and we do not prorate a partial period unless the law where you live requires it.
Seats. School plans are priced per educator seat with a three-seat minimum. Adding a seat mid-period is charged pro rata; removing one takes effect at the next renewal.
Credits. Paid plans include a monthly allowance of agent credits, which meter model usage. Credits are an entitlement, not a stored-value instrument: they refresh each period, do not roll over, and have no cash value or refundability.
Price changes. We may change prices, plan contents, and limits. Changes take effect at your next renewal, and we will give you notice before that renewal so you can cancel instead. A price change never applies retroactively to a period you have already paid for.
Non-payment. If a subscription lapses, the account drops to the free tier. Your data is not deleted because a payment failed. Enterprise and district terms may set out a different arrangement in the signed agreement.
Trials. Where a plan is offered with a free trial, it converts to a paid subscription at the end of the trial unless you cancel first, and we tell you before it does.
11. Intellectual property#
Trace Education and its licensors own the Trace name and marks, the website and application design, the source code, the interface, the SDK, and the curriculum: lessons, labs, quizzes, articles, and the templates behind them. Nothing in these Terms transfers any of that to you.
You get a limited, revocable, non-transferable license to use Trace and its curriculum for teaching and learning within your own class or account. You may not republish, resell, sublicense, or redistribute it.
This section does not cover your content or your generated output, which are governed by §6 and §7.
12. Termination#
You may stop using Trace at any time and delete your account from the app. Deleting an account is subject to the handover rules in §8 of the Privacy Policy: you cannot delete while you are the sole administrator of a school or the lead teacher of a class.
We may suspend or terminate an account that violates these Terms, that we are legally required to close, or if we discontinue Trace. If we shut down the service we will give schools reasonable notice and a way to retrieve their data first.
Schools end an engagement under their own agreement. Termination of a school agreement triggers the return-or-delete obligations in §7 of the DPA.
Sections that by their nature survive termination do survive it: §6 (the license already exercised), §7, §8, §11, §13, §14, §15, and §16.
13. Disclaimer of warranties#
THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED ON AN "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. TRACE EDUCATION DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, TIMELY, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE, THAT DEFECTS WILL BE CORRECTED, OR THAT AI-GENERATED OUTPUT WILL BE ACCURATE, APPROPRIATE, ORIGINAL, OR FREE OF INFRINGING CONTENT.
We do not commit to an uptime service level on the plans described in §10. Enterprise agreements may include one; where a signed agreement sets a service level, that agreement controls.
Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of implied warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.
14. Limitation of liability#
To the maximum extent permitted by law, Trace Education is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or loss of goodwill, arising out of or relating to your use of Trace, however caused and on any theory of liability.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, Trace Education's total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to these Terms or the service is limited to the greater of (a) the total fees you paid to Trace Education in the twelve months immediately before the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) one hundred US dollars (USD $100).
Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain warranties or of liability for certain types of damages. This includes protections for consumers in the EEA and the UK, under the Australian Consumer Law, and under the New Zealand Consumer Guarantees Act. The exclusions and limits above apply only to the extent permitted. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.
Nothing in this section limits a public school or district's rights that cannot be waived under applicable state law.
15. Indemnity#
This section applies only to business and institutional customers. These include schools, districts, educational organizations, and users on a paid Educator, Educator Pro, School-wide, or Enterprise plan acting in that capacity. It does not apply to students or individuals on the Free or Self-learner plans.
Where it applies, the customer will defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Trace Education and its officers, employees, and agents from third-party claims, damages, liabilities, and reasonable legal fees arising from: the customer's content or its users' content; the customer's use of generated output; the customer's breach of these Terms; the customer's failure to obtain the parental notice or consent it represented it had obtained; and the customer's violation of third-party rights or applicable law.
Trace Education will notify the customer promptly of any claim, give the customer control of the defense, and cooperate reasonably. No settlement that admits liability on Trace Education's behalf may be made without our consent.
Public school districts and other public bodies that are legally unable to indemnify a vendor are not asked to; for those customers this section does not apply, and liability is allocated as the signed agreement and applicable law provide.
16. Governing law and venue#
These Terms are governed by the laws of [governing law and venue to be confirmed by counsel], without regard to conflict-of-law principles, and disputes will be brought exclusively in the state or federal courts sitting there. Each party consents to personal jurisdiction in those courts.
The following exceptions apply:
- Public education customers. Many public school districts cannot agree to out-of-state venue, arbitration, or a choice of law other than their own. For those customers, the governing law and venue set out in their signed agreement controls, and in the absence of one, the law of the state in which the district is located.
- Consumers. If you are a consumer resident in the EEA, the UK, or another jurisdiction whose law gives you the right to bring proceedings locally, nothing here deprives you of the protection of your local mandatory consumer law or of your right to sue where you live.
There is no mandatory arbitration clause in these Terms and no class-action waiver.
17. Changes to these terms#
We may update these Terms. Material changes are posted here with a new "Last updated" date. We notify affected schools and paying customers by email, in-app, or both before a material change takes effect.
Your continued use of Trace after a change is posted constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms. If you do not accept a change, stop using Trace and cancel your subscription; §10 governs what happens to the period you have paid for.
18. Contact#
For questions about these Terms or your account, email [email protected]. We aim to reply within five business days.
Copyright and DMCA. If you believe material on Trace infringes your copyright, send a notice to [email protected] with: your contact information; identification of the work you say is infringed; identification of the material on Trace and enough detail to locate it; a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law; a statement that the information in the notice is accurate and, under penalty of perjury, that you are authorized to act for the owner; and your physical or electronic signature. We respond to valid notices and to valid counter-notices, and we terminate the accounts of repeat infringers.
Postal mail: TraceEducation LLC, 531 Main Street, New York, NY 10044.
Entity: Trace Education is operated by TraceEducation LLC.
Prepared for review by qualified counsel before it is relied on in a specific jurisdiction.