Terms of Service

The agreement between you and [LEGAL ENTITY NAME] governing your use of DollarScholar. It includes a licence grant, important financial disclaimers, a limitation of liability, and an arbitration clause with a class-action waiver.

Effective August 20, 2026 · Version 2026-08-20 · See also Privacy Policy

Please read these terms carefully. They limit our liability to you, disclaim warranties, and require most disputes to be resolved by binding individual arbitration rather than in court or by class action. Section 19 explains how to opt out of arbitration within 30 days.

1.Acceptance of these terms

These Terms of Service (the “Terms”) form a binding legal agreement between you (“you”) and [LEGAL ENTITY NAME] (“we”, “us”, or “our”), the operator of DollarScholar (the “Service”). By creating an account, checking the box indicating that you agree to these Terms, connecting a financial account, or otherwise accessing or using the Service, you accept these Terms and our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated here by reference.

If you do not agree to these Terms, do not create an account and do not use the Service. If you are accepting these Terms on behalf of a company or other organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that entity, and “you” refers to that entity.

2.Eligibility

To use the Service, you must:

be at least 18 years old and able to form a binding contract;
be a resident of, and accessing the Service from, the United States;
own, or be an authorized user of, every financial account you connect — you may not connect an account belonging to another person without their express permission;
not be barred from using the Service under the laws of the United States or any other applicable jurisdiction, and not appear on any U.S. government restricted-party list.

The Service is designed for personal, non-commercial budgeting. It is not offered to, or intended for, users outside the United States, and we make no claim that it complies with the laws of any other country.

3.What DollarScholar is — and is not

DollarScholar is a personal budgeting and record-keeping tool. It reads transaction data from financial accounts you choose to connect, lets you record entries manually, and presents summaries, categories, goals, and reports based on that data.

DollarScholar is not a bank, credit union, money transmitter, broker-dealer, investment adviser, tax adviser, accountant, credit-repair organization, or financial planner. Nothing in the Service is financial, investment, tax, accounting, or legal advice. We do not hold, move, transfer, or have custody of your money, and we cannot execute any transaction on any of your accounts.

Every figure, category, projection, goal status, alert, and report the Service produces is informational only. Decisions you make about your money are entirely your own. Before acting on anything you see here — paying a bill, moving funds, changing a budget, filing a tax return — you are responsible for verifying it against your financial institution’s own records and, where appropriate, consulting a licensed professional.

4.Your account

You must provide accurate information when registering and keep it current. You are responsible for all activity that occurs under your account, and for maintaining the confidentiality of your password and any device or email account that can access it.

Notify us immediately at support@getdollarscholar.com if you suspect unauthorized access. We provide tools to help you respond — you can change your password, sign out of all sessions and devices, and disconnect any bank connection at any time from your account settings.

You may not share your account, sell it, or transfer it to anyone else. We may refuse registration, or suspend or terminate an account, in accordance with Section 18.

5.Licence to use the service

Subject to your continuous compliance with these Terms, we grant you a limited, personal, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable licence to access and use the Service for your own personal, non-commercial money management, for as long as your account remains active.

This is a licence to use a hosted service, not a sale. No ownership passes to you. We and our licensors retain all right, title, and interest in and to the Service, including all software, source code, design, text, graphics, the DollarScholar name and logo, and all associated intellectual property rights. All rights not expressly granted here are reserved.

Your data stays yours

You retain ownership of the financial and personal data you supply or connect (“Your Data”). You grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive licence to host, store, copy, process, transmit, and display Your Data solely to the extent necessary to operate, secure, support, and improve the Service for you — and for no other purpose. This licence ends when you delete the data or your account, subject to the retention terms in the Privacy Policy.

We do not sell Your Data, and we do not rent or disclose it to marketers or data brokers. We do not use the content of your transactions to train machine-learning models. This commitment is also a binding condition of our access to the Plaid platform.

Feedback

If you send us suggestions or feedback, you grant us an unrestricted, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free right to use it without obligation or compensation to you.

6.Licence restrictions

You may not, and may not permit anyone else to:

copy, modify, translate, or create derivative works of the Service, or reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble any part of it, except to the extent this restriction is unenforceable under applicable law;
rent, lease, lend, sell, sublicense, resell, or offer the Service — or any output, report, or data derived from it — to any third party as a service or product of your own;
access the Service by any automated means (scrapers, bots, headless browsers) or through any interface other than the one we provide, or build a competing or derivative product from it;
circumvent, disable, or probe any authentication, rate limit, encryption, or other security or access-control measure;
remove, obscure, or alter any copyright, trademark, or other proprietary notice;
use the Service to store or process data belonging to anyone who has not personally agreed to these Terms.

7.Bank connections and Plaid

Bank connectivity is provided by Plaid Inc. (“Plaid”), an independent third party. When you link an account, you are redirected to Plaid’s own interface to authenticate directly with your financial institution.

We never see, receive, or store your online banking username or password. Those credentials are entered on Plaid’s screens and handled solely between you, Plaid, and your financial institution.

By connecting an account, you authorize us and Plaid to access, retrieve, and store account and transaction information from that financial institution on your behalf, on an ongoing basis until you disconnect it. You appoint us as your limited agent solely for this purpose, and you represent that doing so does not violate your agreement with that institution.

Your use of Plaid is governed by Plaid’s own End User Privacy Policy, not by these Terms. We are not responsible for Plaid’s services, availability, accuracy, acts, or omissions. Financial institutions may change, throttle, or block third-party access at any time without notice to us, which can interrupt or permanently end a connection.

You may disconnect any institution at any time from the Accounts page. Disconnecting stops future syncing; transactions already imported are retained in your account by default so your history stays intact, and you can delete them or your entire account separately.

8.Accuracy of financial data

Transaction data is supplied by your financial institutions through Plaid. We pass through what we receive; we do not independently audit or verify it, and we have no ability to correct errors at the source.

We do not warrant that any balance, transaction, category, total, forecast, goal status, or report shown in the Service is accurate, complete, current, or free of error or omission. Your financial institution’s own statements are the authoritative record of your accounts — not DollarScholar.

Data shown in the Service may be wrong or incomplete for reasons entirely outside our control, including:

delays, outages, or errors at your financial institution or at Plaid;
pending transactions that later change amount, date, or description, or are reversed entirely;
a connection silently expiring, requiring re-authentication before syncing resumes;
transactions posted outside a sync window, or never returned by the institution at all;
transfers between your own accounts being misidentified, affecting cash-flow totals.

The Service surfaces sync-health warnings when it can detect a stale or broken connection, but those warnings are best-effort and cannot be relied upon to catch every failure. You are responsible for reconciling against your actual statements.

9.AI-generated categories and summaries

Some features use third-party artificial-intelligence models to suggest transaction categories, compile categorization rules from your instructions, and write the narrative summaries that appear in reports. To provide these features, transaction descriptions, amounts, dates, and category names are sent to our AI provider. Bank credentials, account numbers, your name, and your email address are not.

AI output is probabilistic and can be wrong, incomplete, or misleading, including in ways that look confident and plausible. Categories, rules, and written summaries are suggestions only. Never treat an AI-generated summary as an accounting record, a tax document, or advice.

You remain in control: categorization changes are logged in an audit trail, and rule applications can be reviewed and undone. You are responsible for reviewing AI output before relying on it, and we are not liable for any decision you make on the basis of it.

10.Your responsibilities

You agree that you are solely responsible for:

verifying all financial information against your institution’s official statements;
all financial, tax, and legal decisions you make, whether or not informed by the Service;
maintaining your own records — the Service is not a system of record, a books-and-records solution, or a backup of your financial history;
keeping your credentials and email account secure, and promptly reporting suspected compromise;
the accuracy of manual entries, categories, rules, and goals you create;
reviewing notifications and alerts as informational prompts only — never as a guarantee that a bill will be paid, a balance is sufficient, or a goal will be met.

11.Acceptable use

You may not use the Service to:

break any law, or facilitate money laundering, fraud, or terrorist financing;
access any financial account you are not authorized to access;
upload or transmit malware, or interfere with, overload, or disrupt the Service or the infrastructure it depends on;
attempt to gain unauthorized access to any account, system, or data that is not yours, or perform any security testing without our prior written permission;
impersonate anyone, or misrepresent your affiliation with any person or entity;
infringe anyone’s intellectual property or privacy rights.

12.Fees and paid plans

The Service is currently offered free of charge. We reserve the right to introduce paid plans, subscriptions, or fees for some or all features in the future.

If we do, we will give you advance notice and the terms will be presented to you before you are charged anything — including price, billing frequency, renewal terms, and how to cancel. No charge will ever be applied without your express prior authorization, and continuing to use the free tier will never by itself create a payment obligation. If you do not accept new paid terms, your remedy is to stop using the affected features or close your account.

13.Third-party services

The Service depends on independent third parties — including Plaid for bank connectivity, our AI provider, our email provider, and our hosting and database providers. They are listed, with links to their own privacy policies, in the Privacy Policy.

Those services are governed by their own terms and policies. We do not control them, we are not responsible for their acts or omissions, and we are not liable for any outage, error, breach, price change, or discontinuation originating with them. Any one of them ceasing to operate could degrade or end the Service.

14.Availability and changes

The Service is provided on an as-available basis. We do not guarantee any level of uptime, availability, or performance, and we make no service-level commitment of any kind.

We may modify, suspend, add to, or discontinue any part of the Service — or the Service in its entirety — at any time, with or without notice. Where we discontinue the Service entirely, we will make reasonable efforts to notify registered users and to provide a window in which to export data, but we do not guarantee this and are not liable for failing to do so.

DollarScholar is actively developed and should be treated as an evolving product. Features may change or be removed, and defects may exist.

15.Disclaimer of warranties

The service, including all data, categories, reports, forecasts, alerts, and AI-generated output, is provided “as is” and “as available”, with all faults and without warranty of any kind.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we expressly disclaim all warranties, whether express, implied, statutory, or otherwise, including all implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title, non-infringement, accuracy, and any warranties arising from course of dealing, course of performance, or usage of trade.

We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free; that any financial data will be accurate, complete, or current; that defects will be corrected; that the service is free of viruses or other harmful components; or that any result obtained from the service will be accurate or reliable. No advice or information, whether oral or written, obtained from us or through the service creates any warranty not expressly stated here.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain implied warranties, so some of the above exclusions may not apply to you. In that case, such warranties are limited to the minimum scope and shortest duration permitted by law.

16.Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, in no event will we, or our owners, officers, employees, contractors, agents, suppliers, or licensors, be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages; or for any loss of profits, revenue, savings, data, goodwill, or business opportunity; or for any overdraft, insufficient-funds fee, late fee, interest charge, penalty, missed payment, declined transaction, credit-score impact, tax liability, investment loss, or other financial loss — arising out of or relating to these terms or the service, however caused and under any theory of liability, even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, our total aggregate liability for all claims arising out of or relating to these terms or the service will not exceed the greater of (a) the total amount you paid us in the twelve months immediately preceding the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) one hundred U.S. dollars (US$100). Because the service is currently free of charge, this means our aggregate liability is capped at US$100.

These limitations apply even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose. They are a fundamental basis of the bargain between us: the Service is provided free of charge, and we could not offer it on these economic terms without this allocation of risk.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited — including liability for fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, gross negligence, or willful misconduct. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of incidental or consequential damages, so the above may not fully apply to you; in that case our liability is limited to the greatest extent permitted by law.

17.Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless [LEGAL ENTITY NAME] and its owners, officers, employees, contractors, agents, suppliers, and licensors from and against any claim, demand, suit, proceeding, loss, liability, damage, penalty, cost, or expense (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) arising out of or relating to:

your use or misuse of the Service;
your violation of these Terms or of any law or regulation;
your connection of any financial account you did not own or were not authorized to access, or any breach of your agreement with a financial institution;
your violation of the rights of any third party;
any decision you made in reliance on the Service.

We reserve the right, at our own expense, to assume exclusive defense and control of any matter subject to indemnification by you, in which case you agree to cooperate with us. You may not settle any matter affecting us without our prior written consent.

18.Termination

You may stop using the Service at any time and may delete your account from your account settings. Deletion is permanent and irreversible.

We may suspend or terminate your access at any time, with or without notice, including if we reasonably believe you have breached these Terms, if your use creates legal or security risk, if required by a third-party provider or by law, or if we discontinue the Service.

On termination, your licence under Section 5 ends immediately and we may delete Your Data in accordance with the Privacy Policy. Export anything you wish to keep before deleting your account. Sections 5 (ownership), 8, 9, 10, and 15 through 23 survive termination, along with any other provision that by its nature should survive.

19.Dispute resolution and arbitration

This section requires most disputes to be resolved by binding individual arbitration and waives your right to a jury trial and to participate in a class action. Please read it carefully. You may opt out within 30 days.

19.1 Informal resolution first

Before starting arbitration or any proceeding, you agree to first contact us at support@getdollarscholar.com with a written description of the dispute and the relief you seek, and to negotiate in good faith for at least 60 days. This step is a precondition to filing. Most issues can be resolved this way, and we commit to engaging with you genuinely.

19.2 Binding individual arbitration

If we cannot resolve the dispute informally, any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service will be settled by binding arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, before a single arbitrator, seated in [COUNTY], [STATE]. The Federal Arbitration Act governs the interpretation and enforcement of this section. The arbitrator’s award may be entered as a judgment in any court of competent jurisdiction.

19.3 Class-action and jury waiver

You and we each waive the right to a trial by jury and the right to bring or participate in any class, collective, consolidated, or representative action. The arbitrator may award relief only in favor of the individual party seeking relief, and only to the extent necessary to provide relief warranted by that party’s individual claim.

If this class-action waiver is found unenforceable as to a particular claim or request for relief, that claim or request will be severed and heard in court, while all other claims proceed in arbitration.

19.4 Exceptions

Either party may bring an individual claim in small-claims court if it qualifies, and either party may seek injunctive or equitable relief in court to protect intellectual property or to stop unauthorized access to the Service. Nothing here prevents you from reporting a concern to a government or regulatory authority.

19.5 How to opt out

You can reject this arbitration agreement without any effect on the rest of these Terms. Send written notice within 30 days of first accepting these Terms to support@getdollarscholar.com or to [MAILING ADDRESS], stating your name, the email address on your account, and that you opt out of arbitration. Opting out will not affect your access to the Service in any way.

19.6 Time limit

To the extent permitted by law, any claim arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service must be filed within one year after it arises, or it is permanently barred.

20.Governing law and venue

These Terms and any dispute arising from them are governed by the laws of the State of [STATE] and the Federal Arbitration Act, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. For any dispute not subject to arbitration, you and we consent to the exclusive personal jurisdiction and venue of the state and federal courts located in [COUNTY], [STATE]. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

21.Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. When we do, we will revise the version and effective date at the top of this page. For material changes, we will make reasonable efforts to notify you in advance — by email to the address on your account, or by an in-app notice — before they take effect.

Your continued use of the Service after changes take effect constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms. If you do not agree, your remedy is to stop using the Service and delete your account. Changes will not apply retroactively to a dispute that arose before the change.

22.General provisions

Entire agreement

These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Service, superseding all prior agreements, proposals, and communications on the subject.

Severability

If any provision is held invalid or unenforceable, it will be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable — or, if that is not possible, severed — and the remaining provisions will continue in full force.

No waiver

Our failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later. A waiver is effective only if in writing and signed by us.

Assignment

You may not assign or transfer these Terms or any rights under them without our prior written consent; any attempt to do so is void. We may assign these Terms freely, including in connection with a merger, acquisition, reorganization, or sale of assets.

Force majeure

We are not liable for any failure or delay caused by circumstances beyond our reasonable control, including acts of God, natural disaster, war, terrorism, labor dispute, government action, internet or utility failure, cyberattack, or the failure, suspension, or discontinuation of any third-party service on which the Service depends.

Relationship of the parties

No agency, partnership, joint venture, employment, or fiduciary relationship is created by these Terms. We owe you no fiduciary duty.

Notices

We may send you notices by email to the address on your account or by posting them in the Service; notices are deemed received when sent or posted. You must send us legal notices in writing to [MAILING ADDRESS], with a copy to support@getdollarscholar.com.

Headings

Section headings are for convenience only and do not affect interpretation.

23.Contact

Questions about these Terms? Email support@getdollarscholar.com, or write to [LEGAL ENTITY NAME] at [MAILING ADDRESS].