Terms of Service

1. Acceptance of Terms

By creating an account, accessing, or using the SparkStudy platform in any manner (collectively, "use"), you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these Terms of Service, our Privacy Policy, and our Refund Policy (together, the "Agreement"). The Agreement is a legally binding contract between you (the "User", "you") and Ethan Fischer doing business as SparkStudy (the "Owner", "SparkStudy", "we", "our").

If you are using the Service on behalf of an organization, you represent that you have authority to bind that organization to these Terms.

2. Definitions

• Service: the SparkStudy website, mobile-friendly web app, all subdomains, APIs, and any related tools or content.
• Content: all text, images, videos, audio, AI-generated material, study questions, simulators, code-book references, and any other material made available through the Service.
• AI Content: Content generated by large-language-model or other artificial-intelligence systems (including Anthropic Claude, OpenAI GPT/DALL-E, or any successor models).
• User Content: any material you upload, post, paste, or otherwise submit to the Service, including study notes, uploaded course modules, voice or text questions, and account information.
• Subscription: a recurring paid plan (Elite or other) that unlocks premium features.
• CEC: the Canadian Electrical Code, Part I (CSA C22.1) published by CSA Group.

3. Eligibility & Age

You must be at least 18 years of age (the age of majority in Alberta) to enter into this Agreement and to subscribe to any paid plan. If you are between 13 and 17 years of age, you may use the Service only with the consent and supervision of a parent or legal guardian, and that parent or guardian agrees to be bound by these Terms on your behalf.

The Service is not directed at children under 13 and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 13. If we learn we have collected such information, we will delete it.

You must reside in a jurisdiction where it is legal to enter into this Agreement and where the Service is lawful to use.

4. Service Description

SparkStudy is an educational supplement designed to help Alberta electrical apprentices prepare for trade-school period exams and the Alberta Journeyman Electrician Certificate of Qualification examination. It provides AI-assisted study questions, study guides, simulators, flashcards, practice exams, notes tools, and other learning aids based loosely on common Alberta apprenticeship curriculum topics and references to the Canadian Electrical Code.

The Service is provided "as is" and the Owner may add, remove, or modify features at any time without notice.

5. Electrical Safety — Critical Disclaimer

All electrical work must be performed only by a person who is properly trained, qualified, and (where required by law) licensed or certified, and only in accordance with: the most current edition of the Canadian Electrical Code, all applicable provincial and municipal codes and amendments, manufacturer instructions, employer safety procedures, and the directions of a qualified supervisor or inspector.

You are solely responsible for the safety of any electrical work you perform or supervise. SparkStudy and its Owner accept no responsibility for any electrical injury, death, fire, property damage, equipment damage, code violation, regulatory penalty, or any other loss arising from action or inaction based in whole or in part on Content from the Service.

6. Educational Use Only — No Reliance

Content on SparkStudy is provided for general educational and exam-preparation purposes. It does not constitute professional advice of any kind — including but not limited to legal, engineering, safety, electrical, regulatory, or compliance advice. No advisor-client, instructor-student, or fiduciary relationship is created by your use of the Service.

The Service is not a substitute for: accredited apprenticeship training, formal classroom instruction, hands-on work experience under a qualified supervisor, official course materials provided by your technical institute, or examination by a qualified instructor.

You acknowledge that exam results, certifications, employment outcomes, and on-the-job performance depend on many factors outside the Owner's control, and the Owner makes no guarantee that use of the Service will produce any particular result.

7. AI-Generated Content Disclaimer

A substantial portion of the Content on SparkStudy is produced or assisted by artificial-intelligence language and image models, including third-party services operated by Anthropic, OpenAI, and others. AI-generated Content has known and unavoidable limitations:

• It can produce information that is incorrect, outdated, incomplete, or fabricated ("hallucinated") even when presented confidently.
• It may misquote, misnumber, or invent references to the Canadian Electrical Code, rules, sections, tables, or amendments.
• It may produce calculations, formulas, or diagrams with errors.
• It may reflect biases or omissions in its training data.

You are solely responsible for evaluating the accuracy, completeness, and suitability of any AI-generated Content before relying on it for any purpose. Always verify against authoritative sources — the official Canadian Electrical Code, your course materials, your instructor, and a qualified person.

SparkStudy and the Owner make no representation or warranty that any AI-generated Content is accurate, current, complete, fit for purpose, or free of harmful, biased, or infringing material. You use AI-generated Content at your own risk.

8. Canadian Electrical Code References

The Canadian Electrical Code, Part I (CSA C22.1) is published by CSA Group and is protected by Canadian and international copyright. SparkStudy is not licensed by CSA Group and is not affiliated with CSA Group.

Where the Service summarizes, paraphrases, references, or links to CEC concepts, rules, sections, or tables, those references are for educational discussion only and are not a substitute for the official Code. The official, complete, and current version of the CEC must be obtained directly from CSA Group or its authorized resellers. SparkStudy does not distribute the CEC and provides no excerpts of the Code at sufficient length to substitute for the official publication.

If you require the Code for any work, study, certification, or regulatory purpose, you must obtain it from CSA Group directly.

9. Subscription, Billing & Auto-Renewal

Free and Paid Plans

SparkStudy offers a free plan with limited features and one or more paid plans ("Elite" or successor names) that unlock additional features. Pricing for paid plans is displayed on the pricing page and may change from time to time; price changes will not affect billing periods you have already paid for.

Auto-Renewal

Cancellation

You may cancel auto-renewal at any time from your account Settings page or by emailing Cookie preferences info@sparkystudy.com. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period; you retain access to paid features until that date.

Failed Payments

If a payment fails, we may retry the charge for a short grace period and then downgrade your account to the free plan. We are not responsible for any overdraft, interest, or fees charged by your bank.

Taxes

Prices displayed may not include applicable GST, HST, PST, or other sales taxes, which will be added at checkout where required by law.

10. Refunds

All subscription payments are final and non-refundable except as required by applicable consumer-protection law or as expressly provided in our Refund Policy. The Refund Policy describes the limited circumstances under which a refund may be requested and the documentation required.

11. Acceptable Use Policy

You agree NOT to, and not to allow others to:

• Use the Service for any unlawful, deceptive, harassing, or harmful purpose.
• Share, lend, sell, transfer, or sublicense your account, credentials, or paid access to any other person.
• Create multiple accounts to circumvent limits, free trials, promotions, or bans.
• Use bots, scrapers, headless browsers, or any automated means to access, harvest, or copy Content from the Service.
• Reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or attempt to derive source code of any part of the Service.
• Resell, redistribute, or commercialize Content (including AI-generated study questions, flashcards, or notes) in any form, whether free or paid.
• Use Content to train, fine-tune, evaluate, or improve any third-party machine-learning model or dataset.
• Upload User Content that infringes another party's intellectual property rights, contains malware, contains personal information of others without their consent, or violates any law.
• Attempt to overload, disrupt, probe, or attack the Service or its infrastructure (DoS, injection, brute-force, scraping at scale, etc.).
• Misuse promo codes, referral credits, or any other discount mechanism.
• Impersonate any other person, instructor, institution, or authority, or misrepresent your affiliation.
• Use the Service to cheat on any examination, certification process, or coursework in a manner that violates the rules of the issuing institution or authority.

The Owner may investigate suspected violations and may suspend or terminate accounts in violation, with or without notice, at the Owner's sole discretion.

12. Account Terms & Security

• You may maintain only one personal account.
• You must provide accurate, complete, and current information when you sign up, and keep it current.
• You are solely responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your login credentials and for all activity that occurs under your account.
• You must notify us promptly at info@sparkystudy.com if you suspect unauthorized access to your account.
• The Owner is not liable for any loss arising from unauthorized use of your account due to your failure to safeguard your credentials.

13. User Content & License Grant

You retain ownership of any User Content you submit. However, by submitting User Content to the Service, you grant SparkStudy a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable license to host, store, reproduce, process, modify (e.g., format conversion, OCR, summarization), and display that User Content solely for the purpose of providing and improving the Service to you.

You represent and warrant that you have all rights necessary to grant the above license — including that User Content you upload does not infringe any third party's copyright, trademark, privacy, or other rights, and does not violate any law.

Copyrighted course materials: If you upload copyrighted course modules, textbooks, code books, or other third-party material, you represent that you have the right to do so (e.g., as a personal study aid under fair-dealing principles of the Copyright Act (Canada)). You acknowledge that the Owner may, but is not required to, remove User Content that appears to infringe third-party rights, and may suspend accounts that repeatedly upload infringing material.

You may delete your User Content at any time from your account; deletion from active storage is immediate, while removal from encrypted backups occurs in the ordinary course (up to 90 days).

14. Intellectual Property of SparkStudy

All Content on the Service — including the SparkStudy name, logo, design, layout, source code, original study questions, simulators, games, worksheets, illustrations, prompts, AI orchestration, and curated study material — is owned by the Owner or its licensors and is protected by copyright, trademark, and other intellectual-property laws.

Subject to your compliance with these Terms, the Owner grants you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable license to access and use the Service and Content for your own personal, non-commercial study purposes only. All other rights are reserved.

Nothing in these Terms transfers any intellectual-property right to you. You may not copy, reproduce, modify, distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, republish, transmit, sell, license, rent, lease, or create derivative works of any Content without the Owner's prior written consent.

15. Third-Party Services

The Service relies on third-party providers for hosting, authentication, payments, AI inference, email, analytics, and bot protection, including but not limited to: Railway (application hosting), Firebase / Google Cloud (authentication, database, storage), Stripe (payment processing), Anthropic and OpenAI (AI inference and text/speech/image generation), Resend (transactional email), Cloudflare (content delivery, security, and signup bot-protection via Cloudflare Turnstile), and Google Analytics / Google Ads (analytics and conversion measurement, subject to your cookie preferences).

Your use of the Service may also be subject to those providers' terms and privacy practices. The Owner is not responsible for the acts or omissions of any third-party provider. Service interruptions, data loss, or security incidents caused by a third-party provider are addressed in the Limitation of Liability section below.

16. Communications & Marketing (CASL)

By creating an account, you consent to receive transactional emails necessary to provide the Service — including account, billing, security, and customer-support communications. These are exempt from express-consent requirements under Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL).

We will only send commercial-electronic-message ("marketing") emails — promotions, newsletters, feature announcements — if you separately opt in. You may withdraw marketing consent at any time using the "unsubscribe" link in any marketing email or by emailing info@sparkystudy.com. Withdrawing marketing consent does not affect transactional emails.

17. Privacy

Our collection and handling of your personal information is governed by our Privacy Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms by reference. By using the Service you consent to the privacy practices described there.

18. Disclaimer of Warranties

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE SERVICE AND ALL CONTENT ARE PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, ACCURACY, OR QUIET ENJOYMENT.

WITHOUT LIMITING THE FOREGOING, THE OWNER DOES NOT WARRANT THAT: (a) THE SERVICE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, SECURE, OR ERROR-FREE; (b) ANY CONTENT WILL BE ACCURATE, COMPLETE, OR CURRENT; (c) ANY DEFECT WILL BE CORRECTED; OR (d) THE SERVICE WILL MEET YOUR REQUIREMENTS.

19. Limitation of Liability

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE OWNER, ITS AFFILIATES, AND THEIR RESPECTIVE DIRECTORS, OFFICERS, EMPLOYEES, AND AGENTS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES — INCLUDING WITHOUT LIMITATION DAMAGES FOR LOST PROFITS, LOST REVENUE, LOST DATA, LOSS OF GOODWILL, EXAM FAILURE, LOSS OF EMPLOYMENT OR LICENSURE, BUSINESS INTERRUPTION, BODILY INJURY, PROPERTY DAMAGE, OR EMOTIONAL DISTRESS — ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO YOUR USE OF OR INABILITY TO USE THE SERVICE, ANY CONTENT, OR THESE TERMS, WHETHER BASED ON WARRANTY, CONTRACT, TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), STATUTE, OR ANY OTHER LEGAL THEORY, EVEN IF THE OWNER HAS BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

IN NO EVENT WILL THE OWNER'S TOTAL CUMULATIVE LIABILITY ARISING OUT OF OR RELATED TO THIS AGREEMENT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE TOTAL AMOUNT YOU PAID TO SPARKSTUDY IN THE TWELVE (12) MONTHS PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO LIABILITY, OR (B) CAD $100.

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages. To the extent any such limitation is unenforceable, the Owner's liability will be limited to the maximum extent permitted by applicable law.

20. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless the Owner and its affiliates, directors, officers, employees, contractors, agents, and licensors from and against any and all claims, liabilities, damages, losses, costs, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or related to: (a) your use of or access to the Service or Content; (b) your User Content; (c) your violation of these Terms; (d) your violation of any law or the rights of a third party (including intellectual-property, privacy, or publicity rights); (e) any electrical work or other activity you perform, supervise, or sign off on. The Owner reserves the right, at its own expense, to assume the exclusive defense and control of any matter otherwise subject to indemnification by you.

21. Termination

You may stop using the Service at any time and may delete your account from your account Settings page. The Owner may suspend or terminate your access — temporarily or permanently — at any time and for any reason, with or without notice, including for violations of these Terms, suspected fraud, abusive conduct, non-payment, or to comply with law.

Sections that by their nature should survive termination (including Intellectual Property, User Content license, Disclaimers, Limitation of Liability, Indemnification, Dispute Resolution, Class Action Waiver, and these miscellaneous provisions) will survive any termination of this Agreement.

22. Dispute Resolution & Governing Law

This Agreement is governed by the laws of the Province of Alberta and the laws of Canada applicable in Alberta, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. The Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods does not apply.

Before filing any claim or lawsuit, you agree to first attempt to resolve the dispute informally by emailing info@sparkystudy.com with a written description of your claim. The Owner will attempt to resolve the dispute informally within 30 days of receipt.

If informal resolution fails, the parties agree that any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to this Agreement or the Service that is not resolved informally will be resolved by binding arbitration administered in Alberta under the Alberta Arbitration Act, RSA 2000, c A-43, by a single arbitrator selected by mutual agreement (or, failing agreement, by the Alberta Arbitration and Mediation Society). The arbitration will be conducted in English in Calgary, Alberta. Each party bears its own legal fees unless the arbitrator awards otherwise. Nothing in this section prevents either party from seeking injunctive or equitable relief in a court of competent jurisdiction to protect intellectual property or confidential information.

23. Class Action Waiver

To the fullest extent permitted by law, you and the Owner agree that each may bring claims against the other only in your or its individual capacity, and not as a plaintiff or class member in any purported class, collective, consolidated, or representative proceeding. The arbitrator may not consolidate more than one person's claims and may not preside over any form of representative or class proceeding. This class-action waiver is a fundamental part of this Agreement.

24. Changes to Terms

We may modify these Terms from time to time. If we make material changes, we will provide notice — for example, by email, in-product notification, or by posting the updated Terms with a new effective date at sparkystudy.com/terms.html. Your continued use of the Service after the effective date of the updated Terms constitutes acceptance. If you do not agree to the updated Terms, you must stop using the Service.

25. Force Majeure

The Owner is not liable for any delay or failure to perform resulting from causes beyond its reasonable control — including acts of God, war, terrorism, civil unrest, labour disputes, internet or infrastructure outages, third-party-provider outages, government action, pandemic, or natural disaster.

26. Assignment

You may not assign or transfer this Agreement or any rights or obligations under it without the Owner's prior written consent; any attempted assignment without consent is void. The Owner may assign this Agreement freely, including in connection with a merger, acquisition, sale of assets, or reorganization.

27. Severability & Entire Agreement

If any provision of this Agreement is found unenforceable, that provision will be enforced to the maximum extent permissible and the remaining provisions will remain in full force and effect. Failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of that or any other provision.

This Agreement (together with the Privacy Policy and Refund Policy) constitutes the entire agreement between you and the Owner with respect to the Service and supersedes all prior or contemporaneous communications, proposals, or agreements, whether oral or written.

28. Contact

For questions about these Terms, refund requests, billing issues, account problems, copyright concerns, or any other matter, please contact us at info@sparkystudy.com.