Terms of Service

1. About the service

ChessTing provides chess training tools: opponent scouting, game review, drills, Live Arena, prep notebook, coach workspace, public training profiles, forums, coach marketplace, the ChessTing Discord Bot, and related features. Features vary by plan and deployment (hosted Vercel app vs static GitHub Pages mirror).

2. Eligibility & accounts

• You must be at least 13 (or the age of digital consent in your country).
• You must provide accurate registration information and keep credentials secure.
• One person per account unless we approve otherwise (e.g. shared coach accounts).
• Usernames must not impersonate others or infringe trademarks.
• We may suspend or terminate accounts for violations, fraud, or security risks.

3. Consumer information (UK)

If you are a consumer in the United Kingdom, the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 apply to distance contracts. Key pre-contract information:

4. Plans & subscriptions

Paid subscriptions renew automatically until cancelled via the Stripe billing portal (linked from Pricing or Settings). We will give clear notice of price changes before they apply to renewals, in line with CMA guidance on subscription contracts. You may cancel at any time; access continues until the end of the paid period.

5. Cancellation & refunds (UK consumers)

• 14-day cooling-off — For first-time digital subscriptions, you may cancel within 14 days of purchase for a full refund if you have not substantially used paid features (e.g. extensive Pro scouts beyond free tier). Contact support@chessting.com.
• By starting to use paid features immediately at checkout, you may be asked to acknowledge that you lose the right to cancel once performance begins (Regulation 37(1) exception for digital content).
• Renewals are generally non-refundable except where required by law or at our discretion.
• One-time packs: refundable within 14 days if unused.
• Faulty digital content: you may be entitled to repair, replacement, or refund under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 if the service is not as described or not provided with reasonable care and skill.

6. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• Violate laws, harass others, or post unlawful, defamatory, or hateful content.
• Abuse rate limits, scrape third-party sites outside official APIs, or bypass quotas.
• Spam, bot-post, or impersonate ChessTing staff or other users.
• Upload malware or attempt unauthorised access to systems or accounts.
• Resell scout outputs as a competing data product without permission.
• Use ChessTing to cheat in live games on any platform or over-the-board events.
• Post others' private personal data (doxxing) or Scout reports targeting individuals without consent.

Full community rules: Community Guidelines.

7. User-generated content & licence

• You retain ownership of content you create (notes, reports, posts).
• You grant ChessTing a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, display, and distribute content you post publicly on the service, solely to operate and promote the platform.
• Forum posts and profile content reflect your views, not ChessTing's.
• Scout is private prep; Profiles are your training identity. Do not publish private opponent analysis without lawful basis.

8. Moderation & enforcement

We operate community features (forums, comments, coach listings) and may remove, hide, or lock content; suspend public profiles; or terminate accounts that violate these Terms or Community Guidelines. Our moderators and admins act under role-based access controls.

• Moderators may hide content, lock threads, and suspend coach listings.
• Admins may delete content, pin threads, and assign Moderator roles.
• Superusers manage admin roles.

If your content is removed, you may appeal within 14 days by emailing support@chessting.com with the URL and reason. We are not obliged to host any particular content and are not a publisher of user posts under applicable law.

9. Coach marketplace

Coach listings are advertisements by independent coaches, not employment by ChessTing. We do not guarantee coaching quality, rating improvement, or student volume. Coaches must describe services and pricing accurately. Disputes between coaches and students are primarily between those parties; we may remove misleading listings and suspend accounts that violate these Terms.

Coach Pro is a software subscription for the Coach Hub (student CRM, drills, reports, portals, and related tools). It is not a fee charged for finding work. Marketplace listing and messaging require identity verification. When in-app lesson payments are enabled, students pay through ChessTing; ChessTing may take a disclosed platform fee (currently 10% of lesson GMV). Arranging lesson payment off-platform to evade fees or protections is prohibited once in-app payments are available.

Lesson packages are paid to ChessTing first (platform charge). After a lesson is marked complete, coach payouts are held on the platform for about 72 hours with a student dispute window (about 24 hours). Only after the hold is Coach funds transferred to the coach's connected Stripe account (minus the disclosed platform fee). Refunds while funds are still held return money via Stripe to the original payment method when Stripe confirms success. Policies at checkout and in the Coach Hub apply. We may moderate messages and listing text (including automated filters, which may send user-authored text to a third-party moderation API when configured) to block abuse, threats, and off-platform payment solicitation. We may score refund/chargeback abuse and restrict students or coaches accordingly.

Solicitor note: UK Employment Agencies Act framing of Coach Pro as SaaS must be confirmed before aggressive coach acquisition marketing. See product roadmap / ops docs for the marketplace spec.

Coaching of under-18s via parent/guardian accounts (Phase 3) is not available until ChessTing expressly enables it after legal review. Until then, do not use the marketplace to target minors.

10. Third-party platforms

Game data comes from Chess.com and Lichess public APIs. ChessTing is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Chess.com or Lichess. Their terms apply to your use of their platforms. Live Arena depends on third-party stream availability. The ChessTing Discord Bot runs on Discord, whose own terms and policies also apply to your Discord account and use of Discord.

10a. ChessTing Discord Bot

The ChessTing Discord Bot is an optional extension of the ChessTing service. Some commands work without a ChessTing account; account-specific commands require you to link your Discord account to a ChessTing account through a short-lived confirmation flow on chessting.com.

• You must only link a Discord account that you control. You are responsible for keeping both your Discord and ChessTing accounts secure.
• Linked commands may display your ChessTing identity, plan, usage limits, linked chess handles, training links, or other account information to you inside Discord. Public-profile commands only expose information that ChessTing treats as public.
• If a server enables ChessTing-managed roles, the bot may add or remove only the Discord roles explicitly configured for ChessTing based on your current ChessTing account tier or link status. ChessTing remains the source of truth for entitlements.
• Community and moderation commands may create tickets, polls, suggestions, role panels, timeouts, bans, channel locks, or similar Discord actions where the server has granted the bot the required permissions. Server administrators remain responsible for how they configure and use those tools.
• You must not use the bot to bypass ChessTing quotas, impersonate another person, automate abuse, harass users, or obtain live-game chess assistance prohibited by these Terms or a chess platform's fair-play rules.
• Bot availability depends on Discord and our hosting. We may change, restrict, suspend, or remove bot commands where needed for security, fair play, abuse prevention, platform policy, or maintenance.

You can disconnect the Discord/ChessTing relationship through the ChessTing linking controls. Our Privacy Policy explains the Discord data used for linking and bot operation.

11. Intellectual property

ChessTing branding, UI, and original content are our property or licensed to us. Stockfish and other open-source components remain under their respective licences. You may not copy our UI or branding for a competing product.

12. Disclaimers

• Analysis, coaching text, scout statistics, and drills are for education only — not guarantees of rating improvement or tournament results.
• Engine evaluations depend on depth and hardware — see methodology.
• Nothing in these Terms excludes liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, fraud, or any liability that cannot be excluded under UK law.
• Otherwise the service is provided "as is" without warranties of uninterrupted availability (subject to your statutory consumer rights).

13. Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law (and without limiting statutory consumer rights), ChessTing is not liable for indirect or consequential loss (loss of profits, data, goodwill). Our total liability for any claim is limited to the greater of (a) amounts you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or (b) £100, except where law requires otherwise.

14. Indemnity

You agree to indemnify us against claims arising from your breach of these Terms or your user-generated content, except where caused by our negligence or breach.

15. Termination

You may stop using ChessTing at any time and cancel subscriptions via Stripe. We may suspend or terminate access for violations. On termination, your licence to use the service ends; sections on liability, indemnity, and governing law survive.

16. Complaints & dispute resolution

Contact support@chessting.com. We aim to respond within 14 days. If unresolved after 8 weeks, UK consumers may use alternative dispute resolution; we will provide details on request. Nothing prevents you from bringing court proceedings in your local courts where you have mandatory consumer rights.

17. Governing law & jurisdiction

These Terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales. Courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction for business users. If you are a UK consumer, you may also bring proceedings in the courts of the country where you live.

18. General

• Severability — If any clause is invalid, the rest remains in effect.
• No waiver — Failure to enforce a right is not a waiver.
• Assignment — We may assign these Terms; you may not without our consent.
• Force majeure — We are not liable for delays outside reasonable control (outages, API changes, etc.).

19. Changes

We may update these Terms. Material changes will be posted here with a new date and noted in the changelog. Continued use after the effective date constitutes acceptance where permitted. For material adverse changes to paid plans, we will give reasonable notice before they apply to renewals.

20. Contact

support@chessting.com
17 Highcroft Road, Newport, NP20 5EG