Terms of Use

Effective August 2026 · Last updated August 2026

These Terms of Use (“Terms”) are a binding agreement between you and IEP Guide (“IEP Guide,” “we,” “us”) governing your use of iepguide.org, our mobile apps, and all related features (the “Service”). By accessing or using the Service you accept these Terms and our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

Important. IEP Guide is an independent informational service. It is not a school, district, government agency, healthcare provider, or law firm, and it does not provide legal, medical, therapeutic, educational, or IEP placement advice. Sections on arbitration and class-action waiver, and on limitation of liability, affect your legal rights — please read them.

1. Eligibility and accounts

You must be at least 18 years old, or 13 or older with the consent and supervision of a parent or legal guardian, to create an account. Accounts are for individual use. You are responsible for keeping your credentials confidential and for all activity under your account. Tell us promptly at contact@iepguide.org if you suspect unauthorized use. You may only create profiles for a child for whom you are the parent, legal guardian, or otherwise legally authorized to act.

2. Informational purpose only — no professional advice

Nothing on the Service is legal, medical, therapeutic, educational, psychological, or professional advice, and no attorney–client, clinician–patient, or fiduciary relationship is created. Ratings, scores, staffing figures, and vacancy signals are derived from public datasets that may be incomplete, delayed, estimated, or reported differently across sources. They are a starting point for questions, never a placement recommendation or a prediction about any individual child.

Rights and procedures under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, and the Americans with Disabilities Act are determined by your school district, IEP team, state education agency, and applicable law — not by this site. Always verify staffing, programs, services, and eligibility directly with the school, district, IEP team, or a qualified professional before making a decision.

3. Free access, trial, and paid membership

Free. Creating a free account includes school search and the family profile features described on the Pricing page for one month from sign-up.
Paid. After the free month, a paid membership is required to continue using the paid features. Current prices and inclusions are shown on the Pricing page.

4. Automatic renewal, cancellation, and refunds

This is an automatically renewing subscription. By subscribing you authorize us and our payment processor, Stripe, to charge your payment method the then-current fee plus applicable tax at the start of each billing period (monthly or annual, as selected) until you cancel. Renewal continues automatically until cancelled.

How to cancel. Cancel any time from your Account page in the same number of steps it took to subscribe, or by emailing contact@iepguide.org. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current paid period; you keep access until then.
Renewal notices. Consistent with California’s Automatic Renewal Law (Bus. & Prof. Code § 17600 et seq.) and similar laws in New York, Oregon, Colorado, Illinois, Virginia, Vermont, North Dakota, Hawaii, and other states, we present renewal terms clearly before purchase, send an acknowledgment after purchase, and send advance notice before an annual plan renews or before a material price change takes effect.
Refunds. Fees are non-refundable except where required by law. We will honor cancellation and refund rights that apply to you under your state’s consumer-protection or automatic-renewal statutes, including any applicable cooling-off period, and we will refund a charge made after a valid cancellation.
Price changes. We may change prices with at least 30 days’ advance notice; changes apply to the next billing period and you may cancel before they take effect.
Failed payments. If a charge fails, paid features may be suspended until payment succeeds.

5. Voluntary data entry — child profiles, calendar, and logs

Child profiles, the IEP meeting calendar, service schedules, saved comparisons, and daily check-in logs store information you choose to provide. You decide what to enter. IEP Guide works fully with nicknames or initials, and you never need to enter a full legal name, address, diagnosis, or IEP document. You represent that you have the authority to enter any information you submit about another person.

Daily check-in logs are stored on your device, and free-text meeting notes stay in your browser session until you export them — neither is readable by us. If you clear site data, uninstall the app, close the session, or lose the device, that content cannot be recovered by us. Export a PDF to keep a copy.
A calendar subscription link or exported file is a secret you control. Anyone you share it with can read those entries. Rotate or delete the link if it is exposed.
You can export everything for a child at any time, and deleting a child profile permanently removes it from our servers.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, IEP Guide is not liable for damages arising from information you voluntarily submit, from your sharing of exported files or subscription links, or from loss of on-device data. Nothing here limits our obligation to maintain reasonable security or affects rights under privacy laws that cannot be waived.

6. AI assistant and agent integrations

The AI assistant produces automated, general information that may be incomplete or incorrect. It is not advice, and it must not be relied on for legal, medical, or placement decisions. Do not enter information you would not want processed by an AI service. If you authorize an external AI agent or client through our consent screen, that client acts on your behalf and can access only what your account can access; you are responsible for the clients you authorize and may revoke access at any time.

7. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

Systematically scrape, crawl, harvest, or bulk-extract content or data from the Service.
Republish or redistribute directory content, in whole or in substantial part.
Use our data or content to build or train a competing product, dataset, or model.
Reverse engineer non-public systems, APIs, or scoring algorithms, or circumvent access controls, usage limits, device limits, or payment systems.
Upload unlawful, defamatory, harassing, infringing, or malicious content, or post fake reviews.
Attempt to identify any individual student, or use the Service to invade the privacy of students, families, or staff.
Interfere with, overload, or disrupt the Service or its infrastructure.
Use the Service in violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, export controls, sanctions rules, or any other applicable law.

Violations may result in immediate suspension or termination and legal action.

8. User content and reviews

You retain ownership of content you submit. You grant IEP Guide a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to host, store, reproduce, and display that content solely to operate and improve the Service. Reviews must reflect genuine experience; we do not suppress lawful negative reviews, and consistent with the Consumer Review Fairness Act we do not penalize you for honest feedback. We may remove content that violates these Terms.

9. Intellectual property

The underlying facts in public education datasets are not owned by anyone, but the IEP Guide compilation — the selection, arrangement, scoring methodology, written content, design, and software — is original work protected under U.S. copyright law and other intellectual property laws. All trademarks are the property of their owners; references to districts, agencies, or third-party products do not imply affiliation or endorsement.

DMCA. If you believe content on the Service infringes your copyright, send a notice under 17 U.S.C. § 512(c) to contact@iepguide.org identifying the work, the material, your contact information, a good-faith statement, and a statement under penalty of perjury that you are authorized to act. We will respond, including removing material and terminating repeat infringers where appropriate.

10. Third-party services and links

The Service integrates or links to third parties including Stripe, Google (sign-in, translation, maps and geocoding sources), OpenStreetMap/Nominatim, calendar providers, and video-conference providers. Your use of those services is governed by their own terms and privacy policies. We are not responsible for third-party content, accuracy, or availability.

11. Accessibility

We work toward WCAG 2.1 Level AA conformance. If a barrier prevents you from using any part of the Service, contact us and we will provide the information or transaction through an alternative accessible method.

12. Termination

You may stop using the Service and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these Terms, are used fraudulently or abusively, or attempt to circumvent access or payment controls. We will give notice where practicable and, where termination is not for cause, refund any unused prepaid amount for the current period. Sections that by their nature should survive — including intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, and dispute resolution — survive termination.

13. Disclaimer of warranties

THE SERVICE AND ALL CONTENT ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, ACCURACY, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, or that data, scores, or third-party information are complete or current. Some states do not allow certain warranty exclusions, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

14. Limitation of liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, IEP GUIDE AND ITS OWNERS, EMPLOYEES, AND AFFILIATES WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, OR FOR LOST PROFITS, LOST DATA, OR EDUCATIONAL OUTCOMES, ARISING FROM OR RELATED TO THE SERVICE. OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY FOR ANY CLAIM IS LIMITED TO THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNT YOU PAID US IN THE 12 MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM, OR (B) US $100. These limits do not apply to liability that cannot be limited under applicable law, including gross negligence, willful misconduct, or fraud. Some states do not allow certain limitations, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

15. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless IEP Guide from third-party claims arising out of your misuse of the Service, your violation of these Terms or applicable law, or content you submit or share.

16. Dispute resolution, arbitration, and class-action waiver

Please read carefully — this affects how disputes are resolved. First, contact us at contact@iepguide.org; most issues can be resolved informally within 30 days. If we cannot resolve a dispute informally, you and IEP Guide agree that any dispute will be resolved by binding individual arbitration administered by the American Arbitration Association under its Consumer Arbitration Rules, governed by the Federal Arbitration Act, seated in your county of residence or conducted by phone, video, or documents at your election. Judgment on the award may be entered in any court of competent jurisdiction.

You may opt out of arbitration within 30 days of first accepting these Terms by emailing contact@iepguide.org with your account email and the words “arbitration opt-out.” Opting out does not affect any other part of these Terms.
Either party may bring an individual claim in small-claims court instead.
Claims must be brought individually. Class, collective, consolidated, and representative actions are waived to the extent permitted by law. This waiver does not apply to non-waivable public-injunctive relief, and where a jurisdiction holds any part of this section unenforceable, that part is severed and the remainder stands.
Nothing in this section prevents you from reporting concerns to a government agency.

17. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules, except that the Federal Arbitration Act governs Section 16. Mandatory consumer-protection rights under the law of your home state still apply to you and are not waived by this section. Where arbitration does not apply, the state and federal courts located in California have exclusive jurisdiction.

18. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. For material changes we will update the “Last updated” date and give notice in the app or by email before the change takes effect for existing subscribers. Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance. If you do not accept a change, stop using the Service and cancel.

19. Miscellaneous

These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the entire agreement between us. If a provision is found unenforceable, the rest remains in effect. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver. You may not assign these Terms; we may assign them in connection with a merger or sale. Notices to you may be sent to your account email.

20. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Email contact@iepguide.org or visit the Contact page. Privacy requests: privacy@iepguide.org.

These Terms describe our policies in plain language and are not legal advice. Consumer protection, automatic-renewal, and privacy laws vary by state; where a mandatory right under your state’s law conflicts with these Terms, that law controls.