Terms of service

Scaffolding is an editorial AI tool that critiques college applications. A panel of AI agents reads your application end-to-end and ranks the issues you should fix first. Optional Socratic revision asks you questions about your draft instead of writing prose for you. Scaffolding is not an admissions consultancy and does not guarantee any admissions outcome.

• You must self-report your age bracket at signup. Under-18 users receive the additional protections described in the privacy policy.
• You are responsible for the accuracy of the information in your account and the security of your password.
• One account per person. Account sharing breaks our analytics, our rate-limit counters, and our consent records.

Scaffolding has one product:

• Scaffolding Pass — $99 for one year of access to the full agent committee. Includes 2,000 AI thoughts (one thought = one piece of agent feedback). Auto-renewal is opt-in at checkout, off by default; the Pass expires at year-end unless you opted in.
• 50-thought top-up — $9 one-time, adds 50 thoughts to your active Pass. Buy as many as you want; thoughts do not expire while your Pass is active.

Your first First Read is free — no Pass required. After that, additional First Reads and Socratic revision require an active Pass.

Payments are processed by Stripe. Refund policy: within three days of purchase, full refund — no questions, even if you have used it. Within seven days, full refund if you have not spent any thoughts (balance still equals 2,000). After that, the Pass is non-refundable. Top-ups are non-refundable once purchased.

Scaffolding's critiques are produced by large language models from Anthropic and OpenAI. These models occasionally produce inaccurate, outdated, or fabricated information. Always verify school-specific facts (deadlines, word limits, program requirements) directly with the school's admissions office before acting on any advice.

Where Scaffolding asserts a school-specific claim, the claim is sourced against an in-date entry in our claims registry. Unsourced school-specific claims are blocked at runtime. We publish public postmortems when we get something materially wrong; see /trust/postmortems.

During Socratic revision, our agents ask questions about your draft. They do not write prose for you in that loop. Advanced-tier subscribers can opt into prose suggestions in other surfaces; the AI-Percentage Meter measures how much of a final essay is your own writing, and we surface a warning when AI-authored content exceeds 40% (and again at 60%). The covenant exists because the product is for keeping your voice, not replacing it.

You retain ownership of every essay, profile field, and supplemental answer you upload. We use your content only to run the committee for you and to honor the rights listed in the privacy policy. We do not train any model on your content.

If you opted into the rejection corpus and your application cycle ends without admission, your essays are de-identified after one year and added to the research corpus. Originals are hard-deleted in the same step. You can revoke this consent any time before the de-identification runs.

You may not:

• Submit content that does not belong to you or that you do not have the right to upload.
• Use Scaffolding to generate content for someone else's application.
• Attempt to extract our prompts or attack our agents (prompt injection, jailbreak attempts, data exfiltration).
• Resell, redistribute, or wrap Scaffolding's outputs as your own product.
• Use the product for non-college-application purposes at scale.

We reserve the right to suspend accounts that breach these rules. We may terminate accounts where suspension is not a sufficient remedy.

The Scaffolding name, the agent personas, the Direction A visual system, the prompts, and the codebase are owned by us. You receive a non-exclusive, non-transferable license to use the product per these terms — nothing more.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, our total liability to you for any claim arising out of or relating to your use of Scaffolding is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim. We are not liable for indirect, consequential, or admissions-outcome damages.

You can delete your account at any time from /account. Deletion is hard-deleted after a 30-day grace window. Active Passes are canceled on deletion. Eligibility for a refund follows the standard refund policy in the Pricing section above.

We can terminate your account for cause if you breach these terms or use the product in a way that creates legal or operational risk.

Material changes are emailed to active subscribers and announced on the homepage. Minor wording fixes are not. The “Last updated” date at the top reflects the most recent change.

These terms are governed by the laws of the United States and the state in which the operator resides at the time of the dispute. Specifics will land here once legal review completes.

For terms questions, email legal@scaffolding.app. For product support, email support@scaffolding.app.