Terms and Conditions
These terms cover your use of Synapse, an AI study tool that teaches from course material you provide. By creating an account or signing in, you agree to what follows. If you do not agree, please do not use the service.
1. Your account
You need an account to use Synapse. You can create one with an email address and password, with a Google account, or with a passkey. However you sign in, you get one account, and you are responsible for what happens on it.
Choose a username that is yours to choose. Usernames appear on the public leaderboard, they are unique across everyone using Synapse, and they cannot be changed once claimed. We may reclaim a username that impersonates someone else or that we are required to release.
Keep your password and your recovery phrase to yourself. The recovery phrase is shown once, at the moment you create your account, and it is not stored anywhere we can read. We cannot send you a copy, because we do not have one. If you lose it, you lose access to any storage you connected using it.
You must be old enough to agree to these terms where you live. If you are using Synapse through a school or university, that institution may have its own rules on top of these.
2. Where your material is stored
This is the part most people want to know, so it is near the top rather than buried.
Everything you study stays on your device. The documents you upload, the slides drawn from them, your conversations with the tutor, your quizzes, flashcards and progress all live in your browser’s local storage. They are not copied to our servers, and we cannot read them.
If you connect your own cloud storage in settings, your material syncs there instead, using credentials you supply. Those credentials are encrypted in your browser with a key derived from your recovery phrase before they ever reach us, so what we hold is a block of ciphertext we have no way to open. That is what lets you move to a new device and find your library waiting.
What we do keep on our own servers is short: your username, your email address, a one way hash of your password, a one way hash of your recovery phrase, which sign in methods you have connected, your active sessions, your leaderboard statistics, and a daily counter of how much AI usage you have spent. None of it describes what you are studying.
Because your material lives on your device, clearing your browser data deletes it, and we cannot restore it. If a document matters to you, keep your own copy or connect storage you control.
3. How the AI works, and what it does not guarantee
When you ask the tutor a question, the relevant part of your material is sent to a model provider so the model can answer from it. We route those requests under a zero retention policy, which means the provider is contractually required not to keep or train on what we send.
Synapse can be wrong. It is a study aid, not a source of truth, and it is certainly not a substitute for your actual course, your lecturer or your own reading. Generated questions and explanations are checked against structural rules before you see them, which catches malformed output but cannot catch a confident mistake. Verify anything that matters, especially before an assessment.
Nothing in Synapse is medical, legal, financial or professional advice, whatever subject you happen to be studying.
4. Fair use
Every account has a daily allowance of AI usage. It is set well above normal study and exists so that one person cannot exhaust capacity for everyone else. If you reach it, the allowance resets at midnight UTC, and everything you have already generated stays available.
Please do not:
Upload material you do not have the right to use. Use Synapse to produce work you then present as your own where that is against your institution’s rules. Attempt to extract the system prompts, resell access, or run automated traffic against the service. Try to reach another person’s account or data.
We may suspend an account that does any of these, and we will tell you why where we are able to.
5. Your content
Your material stays yours. Uploading a document to Synapse gives us no ownership of it and no licence to use it for anything beyond running the feature you asked for, at the moment you asked for it.
You keep whatever rights you have in the notes, answers and summaries Synapse produces from your material, subject to the rights of whoever owns the source.
6. Availability
We aim to keep Synapse running and improving, but we do not promise it will be available without interruption. Features may change, and occasionally one may be removed. If we remove something you depend on, we will give reasonable notice where we can.
Synapse depends on model providers we do not control. When one of them has an outage, some AI features degrade or become briefly unavailable. Your material remains readable throughout, because it is on your device.
7. Ending your use
You can stop using Synapse whenever you like. Signing out ends a session; clearing your browser data removes the material stored locally. To have the account record itself deleted, write to us and we will remove it, along with your leaderboard entry.
We may close an account that breaches these terms, or where we are required to. Except in serious cases we will contact you first.
8. Liability
Synapse is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost material where you have not kept your own copy, or for academic outcomes. Nothing here limits liability that cannot legally be limited.
9. Changes to these terms
If we change these terms in a way that materially affects you, we will tell you before the change takes effect, and the date at the top of this page will change. Continuing to use Synapse after that means you accept the revised terms.
10. Contact
Questions about these terms, your account or your data can go to hello@synapse.study. We read everything, and we answer questions about data handling first.