Last updated: May 9, 2026 Effective date: May 9, 2026
These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a legal agreement between you and OpenHours ("OpenHours," "we," "us," or "our") governing your access to and use of the OpenHours website, applications, APIs, software, and related services (collectively, the "Service").
OpenHours is an educational technology service that allows professors to upload course materials and allows students to ask course-scoped questions using an AI assistant. Answers are generated by retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over the materials a professor has uploaded for that course; the assistant is designed to guide rather than replace instruction.
OpenHours is operated jointly by its three maintainers — Emilio Scott, Colin Mcdonald, and Elias Santillan (collectively, the "Maintainers") — who own the Service in equal undivided shares and make material decisions, including changes to these Terms, only by unanimous consent under the OpenHours Proprietary Source License (the "License").
By creating an account, accessing, or using the Service, you agree to these Terms and to the OpenHours Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.
If you use OpenHours through a school, university, professor, district, department, company, or other organization ("Institution"), your use may also be governed by a separate written agreement between OpenHours and that Institution ("Institution Agreement"). If there is a conflict between these Terms and an Institution Agreement, the Institution Agreement controls to the extent of the conflict.
Your Institution may impose additional rules — including codes of conduct, academic integrity requirements, acceptable use rules, privacy notices, or course requirements — and you are responsible for following them.
The License governs ownership of, and any limited permission to view, evaluate, or sublicense, the underlying software. Nothing in these Terms grants any license to the OpenHours source code beyond what the License expressly permits.
You may use the Service only if you can form a binding contract with OpenHours and are not barred from using the Service under applicable law.
If you are under 18, you may use the Service only with permission from a parent, guardian, school, university, professor, or other authorized educational representative, as applicable.
OpenHours is not intended for direct use by children under 13 unless the Service is provided through an Institution with appropriate authorization, consent, or other legal basis under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act ("COPPA") and applicable state laws. If you are under 13 and are not using OpenHours through such an authorized educational context, you may not use the Service.
You may need an account to use the Service. Accounts are managed through Supabase Auth and are associated with a role of professor or student, selected at signup and stored in the OpenHours profiles table. You agree to provide accurate, current, and complete information and to keep it updated.
You are responsible for:
- Keeping your login credentials confidential.
- All activity that occurs under your account.
- Promptly notifying us at security@openhours.me if you believe your account or credentials have been compromised.
You may not share your account, impersonate another person, misrepresent your role, falsify your Institutional affiliation, or access the Service using another person's credentials.
OpenHours supports two roles. Some features are available only to certain roles.
- Students may join courses, ask questions, review AI-assisted responses, and manage their own chat sessions.
- Professors may create and manage courses, upload course materials, review course-level analytics, and manage course content.
OpenHours may rely on the role information provided by you, your Institution, or other authorized users. We are not responsible for errors caused by inaccurate role assignments or unauthorized use of credentials.
The Service is intended to support learning, teaching, and course administration. You agree not to use the Service to violate academic integrity rules, cheat, submit work that is not your own, evade course requirements, or misrepresent AI-assisted work as independently completed work where doing so would violate applicable rules.
Students are responsible for confirming whether and how AI tools may be used in their courses, and for following any disclosure requirements imposed by their professor or Institution. Professors and Institutions are responsible for setting, communicating, and enforcing their own academic integrity policies.
OpenHours does not guarantee grades, academic outcomes, course completion, admission, employment, certification, or any other educational result.
The Service uses AI systems provided by OpenAI to:
- Embed text extracted from course materials (
text-embedding-3-small). - Retrieve relevant course excerpts using cosine similarity over the pgvector index.
- Generate responses to student questions (
gpt-4o-mini), grounded in the top retrieved excerpts. - Cluster recent questions into topics for the professor analytics dashboard (
gpt-4o-mini, capped at the most recent 50 questions per course).
You understand and agree that:
- AI outputs may be inaccurate, incomplete, biased, misleading, or inappropriate.
- AI outputs may not reflect the views of a professor, Institution, or OpenHours.
- AI outputs are provided for educational assistance only and should not be relied upon as the sole source for important academic, professional, legal, financial, health, or safety decisions.
- You are responsible for reviewing, verifying, and appropriately using AI outputs.
- Professors and Institutions remain responsible for instructional decisions, grading, and academic policy.
- The Service does not perform automated decision-making that produces legal or similarly significant effects on individuals.
OpenHours may modify, limit, suspend, or discontinue AI features, change AI models or providers, or adjust retrieval, prompt, or analytics behavior at any time without notice. Material changes affecting users will be reflected in updated Terms or Privacy Policy where required.
"User Content" means content, data, files, course materials, prompts, questions, messages, chat history, feedback, and other materials that you upload, submit, create, transmit, or otherwise provide through the Service.
You retain any ownership rights you have in your User Content, subject to the licenses and rights granted in these Terms.
You grant OpenHours a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, process, transmit, display, perform, modify, create derivative works from (such as text chunks, transcripts, and embeddings), and otherwise use your User Content as necessary to:
- Provide, operate, secure, and improve the Service;
- Process uploaded course materials, including extracting text, splitting it into chunks, and generating vector embeddings;
- Generate AI responses, summaries, transcripts, and analytics;
- Provide support and troubleshoot issues;
- Comply with law and enforce these Terms.
OpenHours may sublicense these rights to Sub-Processors (including Supabase, OpenAI, Vercel, and Railway) only as necessary to provide, secure, support, and improve the Service, and may transfer these rights only as part of a permitted assignment, business transfer, or Institution Agreement.
If you submit User Content through an Institution-controlled account or course, your Institution may have rights to access, control, delete, export, or restrict that content under its agreements and policies.
You represent and warrant that:
- You have all rights, permissions, consents, and authority necessary to submit your User Content and to grant the licenses in these Terms.
- Your User Content does not violate law, these Terms, third-party rights, Institution policies, or course rules.
- You will not submit unnecessary personal information, highly sensitive information (such as health information, financial account information, government identifiers, or precise location), or confidential third-party information unless you have authority to do so and the submission is appropriate for the educational purpose.
Professors are responsible for ensuring they have the right to upload course materials, including copyrighted materials, student work, recordings, transcripts, slides, and other instructional content. In particular, professors represent and warrant that:
- They own or have a license, fair-use basis, or other lawful authority to upload each item of course material.
- Where required, they have provided notice to and obtained consents from students or other individuals appearing in or contributing to the material (for example, recorded lectures, recorded student presentations, or guest speakers).
- They have the authority to upload material on behalf of any Institution to which it relates.
- They will remove material from OpenHours when their authority to use it ends.
Professors acknowledge that the Service generates derivative representations of uploaded material — including extracted text, chunked text, and vector embeddings — and that these representations are stored, retrieved, and shown to students within the same course.
Students are responsible for ensuring their questions, messages, and any pasted or attached content comply with course rules, academic integrity policies, privacy obligations, and applicable law. Students should not paste another student's work, an entire textbook chapter, exam content, or other material they do not have permission to submit.
The Service, including software, interfaces, designs, text, graphics, logos, code, workflows, prompts created by OpenHours, documentation, and other OpenHours materials ("OpenHours Content"), is owned by the Maintainers and protected by intellectual property and other laws. The OpenHours Content is governed by the License.
Subject to these Terms, OpenHours grants you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable license to access and use the Service for your personal, instructional, or Institutional educational purposes during the term of your account.
You may not copy, modify, distribute, sell, lease, sublicense, reverse engineer, decompile, scrape, crawl, or create derivative works from the Service or OpenHours Content except as expressly permitted by law, the License, or a separate written agreement signed by all three Maintainers.
If you provide suggestions, ideas, bug reports, comments, or other feedback to OpenHours, you grant OpenHours and the Maintainers a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable license to use it without restriction or compensation to you, consistent with Section 6 of the License.
You agree not to:
- Use the Service for unlawful, harmful, fraudulent, deceptive, abusive, or harassing purposes.
- Violate academic integrity rules or help others do so.
- Upload or transmit content that infringes, misappropriates, or violates intellectual property, privacy, publicity, contract, or other rights.
- Upload malware, malicious code, or content designed to disrupt systems.
- Attempt to gain unauthorized access to accounts, data, systems, courses, networks, or Sub-Processor accounts.
- Interfere with or disrupt the Service, including by overloading, flooding, or denial-of-service techniques.
- Probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of the Service except in good-faith security research consistent with Section 11 of the License.
- Use automated means to scrape, harvest, or extract data from the Service.
- Use the Service to develop, train, fine-tune, benchmark, or evaluate competing products, datasets, or AI systems without prior written permission from all three Maintainers.
- Remove, obscure, or alter copyright, license, attribution, or other proprietary notices.
- Misrepresent AI-generated content as your own where doing so violates course rules, academic integrity policies, or applicable law.
- Impersonate another person, falsify identity or affiliation, or misrepresent your role.
- Submit content that includes highly sensitive personal information unless necessary and authorized.
- Use the Service in a way that violates export control, sanctions, or other applicable laws.
We may investigate suspected violations and may remove content, restrict access, suspend accounts, or terminate accounts if we believe a violation has occurred. We may cooperate with law enforcement and Institutions where lawful and appropriate.
The OpenHours Privacy Policy explains how we collect, use, disclose, and protect personal information. By using the Service, you acknowledge the Privacy Policy. The Privacy Policy describes our Sub-Processors (including Supabase, OpenAI, Vercel, and Railway), the categories of information we process, our retention defaults, and how to exercise your rights.
If the Service is used through an Institution, the Institution may be responsible for providing required notices, obtaining required consents, and responding to certain education-record or student-privacy requests.
If OpenHours receives education records or personally identifiable information from education records under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act ("FERPA") or similar laws, we will handle that information as described in the Privacy Policy and any applicable Institution Agreement.
Where required by law or agreement, OpenHours will use education records only to provide the Service, support the Institution, comply with authorized instructions, maintain and secure the Service, and fulfill legal obligations. OpenHours will not sell education records and will not use them for targeted advertising.
Parents, guardians, and eligible students should direct FERPA access, correction, or deletion requests to the relevant Institution. OpenHours will reasonably support Institutions in responding to such requests as required by law and applicable agreements.
The Service relies on third-party services, including authentication, database, file storage, AI inference, transcription, hosting, and deployment providers. As of the effective date, our principal Sub-Processors are Supabase (Postgres, Storage, Auth, pgvector), OpenAI (embeddings and chat completion APIs), Vercel (frontend hosting), and Railway (backend hosting). Additional libraries and services include pypdf, python-pptx, openai-whisper (where used), LangChain text splitters, Tailwind CSS, framer-motion, and lucide-react.
OpenHours is not responsible for third-party services it does not control. Your use of third-party services through the Service may be subject to those services' own terms and policies.
OpenHours originated as a hackathon project and remains in active development. Some features may be experimental, beta, preview, or offered for evaluation. Beta features may be changed, suspended, discontinued, or removed at any time and may be less reliable than other features. Certain features described in the codebase (for example, the bookings table and POST /book endpoint) are not currently exposed to users and should not be relied upon.
We may modify, suspend, discontinue, or limit any part of the Service at any time, including features, integrations, AI models, prompt templates, retrieval parameters, storage limits, supported file types, and availability. A decision to discontinue the production Service is a Major Decision under the License and requires unanimous Maintainer consent.
We aim to provide a useful and reliable Service, but we do not guarantee that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or available at any particular time. The Service has no contractual uptime commitment, no service-level agreement, and no service credits.
Unless we separately agree in writing, OpenHours has no obligation to provide support, maintenance, updates, backups, or data recovery. Best-effort support is available at legal@openhours.me.
You are responsible for maintaining your own copies of important course materials, records, assignments, and communications.
OpenHours respects intellectual property rights. If you believe content available through the Service infringes your copyright, you may send a notice to:
OpenHours Copyright Agent Email: copyright@openhours.me
Your notice should include:
- A physical or electronic signature of the copyright owner or authorized representative.
- Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to be infringed.
- Identification of the material claimed to be infringing and information reasonably sufficient to locate it.
- Your contact information.
- A statement that you have a good-faith belief that use of the material 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 on behalf of the copyright owner.
We may remove or disable access to allegedly infringing material and may terminate repeat infringers where appropriate. If you believe material was removed by mistake or misidentification, you may send a counter-notice as permitted by law.
If OpenHours registers a designated agent with the U.S. Copyright Office, the agent information listed in the Copyright Office directory will control for statutory notice purposes.
You may stop using the Service at any time and may request account deletion as described in the Privacy Policy.
We may suspend or terminate your access to the Service, with or without notice, if:
- You violate these Terms or the License.
- Your Institution instructs us to restrict or remove your access.
- We believe your use creates risk, liability, security concerns, or potential harm.
- We discontinue the Service or a material part of it (a Major Decision under the License).
- We are required to do so by law.
Upon termination, your right to use the Service ends immediately. Sections that by their nature should survive termination will survive, including provisions related to content licenses, intellectual property, privacy, disclaimers, limitations of liability, indemnification, and dispute resolution.
THE SERVICE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE." TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, OPENHOURS AND THE MAINTAINERS DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, STATUTORY, OR OTHERWISE, INCLUDING WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, ACCURACY, AVAILABILITY, SECURITY, AND COURSE OF PERFORMANCE.
OPENHOURS DOES NOT WARRANT THAT:
- THE SERVICE WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS.
- THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE, ERROR-FREE, OR FREE OF HARMFUL COMPONENTS.
- AI OUTPUTS WILL BE ACCURATE, COMPLETE, OR APPROPRIATE.
- COURSE MATERIALS OR USER CONTENT WILL BE PRESERVED OR AVAILABLE.
- ANY EDUCATIONAL, ACADEMIC, PROFESSIONAL, OR OTHER OUTCOME WILL BE ACHIEVED.
Some jurisdictions do not allow certain disclaimers, so some of the above may not apply to you.
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, OPENHOURS, THE MAINTAINERS, AND THEIR AFFILIATES, OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, CONTRACTORS, AGENTS, LICENSORS, AND SUB-PROCESSORS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, GOODWILL, DATA, USE, OR OTHER INTANGIBLE LOSSES, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.
TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, OPENHOURS' TOTAL LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS RELATING TO THE SERVICE OR THESE TERMS WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF: (A) THE AMOUNT YOU PAID OPENHOURS TO USE THE SERVICE IN THE 12 MONTHS BEFORE THE CLAIM AROSE; OR (B) ONE HUNDRED U.S. DOLLARS ($100).
The limitations in this section apply to all theories of liability, whether based on warranty, contract, statute, tort, negligence, strict liability, or any other legal theory.
Some jurisdictions do not allow certain limitations of liability, so some of the above may not apply to you. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, you agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless OpenHours, the Maintainers, and their affiliates, officers, directors, employees, contractors, agents, licensors, and Sub-Processors from and against any claims, liabilities, damages, losses, and expenses, including reasonable attorneys' fees, arising out of or related to:
- Your use of the Service.
- Your User Content (including course materials uploaded by professors and content submitted by students).
- Your violation of these Terms or the License.
- Your violation of law or third-party rights, including intellectual property and privacy rights.
- Your misuse of AI outputs.
- Your violation of Institution policies or academic integrity rules.
If you are using the Service on behalf of an Institution, this indemnity applies to the Institution only to the extent permitted by applicable law and the Institution Agreement.
Please contact us first so we can try to resolve concerns informally. You agree to email legal@openhours.me before filing a claim, and we agree to do the same where practical. The parties will attempt in good faith to resolve the dispute informally for thirty (30) days.
Unless a separate Institution Agreement states otherwise, these Terms and any dispute relating to them or the Service are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to conflict-of-law rules. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.
To the maximum extent permitted by law, any dispute not resolved informally will be resolved by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its applicable rules, except that either party may bring an individual claim in small claims court if it qualifies. Arbitration will take place in California unless the parties agree otherwise.
You and OpenHours agree that each may bring claims only in an individual capacity and not as a plaintiff or class member in any class, collective, consolidated, private attorney general, or representative action, except where this waiver is prohibited by law.
You may opt out of arbitration by emailing legal@openhours.me within thirty (30) days after you first accept these Terms. Your opt-out notice must include your name, account email, and a clear statement that you opt out of arbitration.
If this arbitration section is found unenforceable for a particular claim, that claim may be brought only in the state or federal courts located in California, unless otherwise required by law or an Institution Agreement.
We may update these Terms from time to time. The updated version will be indicated by a new "Last updated" date. Material changes to these Terms require unanimous Maintainer consent under the License.
If changes are material, we will provide notice as required by law, which may include in-Service notice, email, or another reasonable method, before the change takes effect. Your continued use of the Service after updated Terms become effective means you accept the updated Terms.
If you do not agree to updated Terms, you must stop using the Service.
You may not use, export, re-export, import, sell, release, or transfer the Service except as authorized by U.S. law and the laws of the jurisdiction where you access the Service. You represent that you are not located in, organized under the laws of, or ordinarily resident in any country or region subject to comprehensive U.S. sanctions and are not on any U.S. government restricted-party list. The Service is provided from the United States and may be subject to U.S. export controls.
These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy, the License (with respect to the underlying software), and any applicable Institution Agreement, are the entire agreement between you and OpenHours regarding the Service.
If any provision of these Terms is found unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full force and effect, and the unenforceable provision will be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable.
You may not assign or transfer these Terms without our prior written consent. OpenHours may assign these Terms in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization, sale of assets, or by operation of law, in each case as a Major Decision under the License.
Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of our right to do so later.
Section headings are for convenience only and do not affect interpretation.
Nothing in these Terms creates an agency, partnership, joint venture, or employment relationship between you and OpenHours.
Neither party will be liable for failure or delay in performance to the extent caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including natural disasters, war, terrorism, riots, embargoes, acts of civil or military authorities, fire, floods, accidents, network or power failures, and acts or omissions of upstream Sub-Processors.
For questions about these Terms, contact:
OpenHours Legal Email: legal@openhours.me
For privacy questions, contact privacy@openhours.me. For security reports, contact security@openhours.me. For copyright notices, contact copyright@openhours.me. Notice to any of these addresses is deemed received by all three Maintainers.