Last updated May 18, 2026
This page contains three documents that apply to your use of alex.study: our Terms of Service, our Privacy Policy, and our Refund & Cancellation Policy. By creating an account or using the site, you agree to all three.
Terms of Service
1. Who we are
alex.study is a service operated by MCAT Tools LLC ("we," "us," "our"). When you create an account or use the site, you're agreeing to these terms.
2. Who can use alex.study
You must be at least 16 years old to create an account. If you're under 18, you confirm that a parent or guardian is aware of and consents to your use of the service. You're responsible for keeping your account credentials secure and for activity that happens under your account.
3. What Alex is — and isn't
Alex is an AI tutor built to help you prepare for the MCAT. Alex can plan your studying, quiz you, explain content, and reflect with you on how things are going.
Alex is not a substitute for medical, legal, financial, or mental health advice. If you're in a crisis or need professional help, please contact a qualified professional or a crisis service. AI tutors can also make mistakes — verify anything that matters with primary sources (AAMC materials, your school's resources, official guidance) before relying on it for a high-stakes decision.
4. No score guarantee
MCAT performance depends on many factors beyond any single study tool. We don't guarantee that using alex.study will produce a particular score, admission outcome, or improvement in your performance. The service is provided "as is."
5. Your content
You own the questions you ask, the notes you write, and the journal entries you create. You grant us a limited license to store, process, and display that content solely to operate the service for you — including running it through AI providers (such as Anthropic, via the Vercel AI Gateway) to generate Alex's responses. We don't sell your content, and we don't share it publicly. See the Privacy Policy below for details.
6. Subscriptions and payments
Paid plans are billed in U.S. dollars through our payment processor (Polar). Subscription terms — price, renewal cadence, included credits, and what's included — are shown at checkout and on your billing page. Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period until you cancel. See the Refund & Cancellation Policy for how cancellations and refunds work.
7. Acceptable use
You agree not to:
- Share your account credentials or let someone else use your account.
- Use the service to harass, threaten, or harm anyone, or to generate content that violates anyone's rights.
- Attempt to break, reverse-engineer, or scrape the service, or circumvent any rate limits, credit caps, or security measures.
- Use Alex's outputs in ways that misrepresent them as professional advice, or in contexts where the integrity of an exam or assessment requires you not to (for example, on a proctored exam).
- Use the service to train a competing AI model or to build a competing product.
8. Intellectual property
The service — including Alex's design, the lesson structure, the question content we author, and the software — is owned by us or our licensors. You may use it for your own MCAT preparation. You may not redistribute, resell, or publicly republish our content.
9. Termination
You can stop using the service at any time. We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these terms or that we reasonably believe pose a risk to other users or to the service. If we terminate your account for cause, we may not refund any prepaid amounts.
10. Disclaimers
The service is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We don't warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that Alex's outputs will be accurate.
11. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by law, MCAT Tools LLC will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or loss of goodwill arising out of your use of the service. Our total liability for any claim related to the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or $100 if you haven't paid anything.
12. Indemnification
You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from any claim, damage, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of your misuse of the service or violation of these terms.
13. Changes to these terms
We may update these terms when the service changes materially. When we do, we'll ask you to re-accept the new version before continuing to use the service. The date at the top reflects the most recent update.
14. Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of Illinois, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute will be resolved in the state or federal courts located in Illinois, and you consent to the jurisdiction of those courts.
Privacy Policy
This Privacy Policy explains what we collect, why we collect it, who we share it with, and the choices you have. We try to keep it short and plain.
1. What we collect
- Account info — your name, email, and authentication identifiers from Clerk (our sign-in provider). If you sign in with Google or Microsoft, we receive the basic profile info those providers send.
- Study data — the questions you ask Alex, your answers and quiz attempts, study plans, journal entries, and the topics and resources you mark as covered. This is what makes Alex useful as a tutor.
- Billing info — when you subscribe, our payment processor (Polar) collects your payment details directly. We don't see or store your full card number; we receive a customer ID, subscription status, and the last four digits of your card.
- Usage and device info — pages you visit on the site, actions you take, IP address, browser type, approximate location (from IP), and timestamps. Collected via our product analytics (PostHog), error monitoring (Sentry), and AI-call observability (Langfuse).
- Email engagement — if we send you a transactional or product email through Brevo, we may see whether it was delivered and opened.
2. How we use it
We process your information to:
- Run the service and let Alex do its job (plan, quiz, explain, reflect).
- Authenticate you, bill you, and provide customer support.
- Improve product quality — debug issues, understand which features help, and evaluate the AI's responses.
- Send service-related emails (receipts, account changes, important notices).
- Detect, prevent, and respond to fraud, abuse, or security incidents.
- Comply with legal obligations.
We do not sell your personal information. We do not use your study content to train third-party AI models; the AI providers we use (Anthropic via Vercel AI Gateway) operate under zero-retention or short-retention enterprise terms and do not train on your inputs.
3. Who we share it with
We share information only with vendors who help us operate the service, and only the data they need to do their job:
- Clerk — authentication and account management.
- Neon — Postgres database hosting (encrypted at rest).
- Vercel — application hosting, edge network, and file storage.
- Anthropic (via Vercel AI Gateway) — AI model inference for Alex's responses.
- Polar — subscription billing and payment processing.
- Brevo — transactional and product email delivery.
- PostHog — product analytics.
- Sentry — error and performance monitoring.
- Langfuse — AI-call tracing and quality monitoring.
We may also disclose information if required by law, to enforce our terms, or to protect the rights, property, or safety of users or the public. If we ever go through a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, your information may be transferred as part of that transaction, and we'll notify you before it becomes subject to a different privacy policy.
4. Cookies and tracking
We use first-party cookies and similar technologies for sign-in sessions, security, and product analytics. We don't use third-party advertising cookies and we don't run ad networks on the service. Your browser's "Do Not Track" signal isn't a recognized standard, so we don't respond to it specifically — but you can disable cookies in your browser settings (some features will break if you do).
5. How long we keep it
We keep your account and study data for as long as your account is active. When you delete your account, we delete or anonymize your personal data within 30 days, except where we need to keep it longer to meet a legal obligation, resolve a dispute, or enforce our agreements. Backups roll off within 90 days. Aggregated, de-identified data (which can't be linked back to you) may be kept indefinitely.
6. How we keep it safe
We use encryption in transit (HTTPS) and at rest, role-based access controls, and audit logging for sensitive operations. We rely on reputable vendors with their own security programs (SOC 2 or equivalent where applicable). That said, no system is 100% secure — if we ever learn of a breach that affects you, we'll notify you and the relevant authorities as required by law.
7. Children
alex.study is not intended for children under 16. We don't knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us their information, contact us and we'll delete it.
8. Your privacy rights
Depending on where you live, you may have the right to access, correct, delete, export, or restrict our use of your personal information, and to withdraw consent where we rely on it. You can do most of this yourself from your account settings, or you can email us at hello@alex.study and we'll help.
U.S. state residents (including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, and other states with comprehensive privacy laws): you have the right to know what we collect, request deletion or correction, opt out of "sales" or "sharing" of personal information (we don't do either), and appeal a denial. We won't discriminate against you for exercising these rights. We may need to verify your identity before fulfilling a request.
EEA/UK residents: our legal bases for processing are performing our contract with you, our legitimate interests in running and improving the service, your consent (where applicable), and compliance with legal obligations. You can lodge a complaint with your local data protection authority. Data we process may be transferred to and stored in the United States; we rely on Standard Contractual Clauses where applicable.
9. International data transfers
We operate from the United States and our infrastructure is hosted there. If you use the service from outside the U.S., your information will be transferred to and processed in the U.S.
10. Changes to this policy
We may update this policy from time to time. Material changes will trigger a re-acceptance prompt on your next visit. The date at the top reflects the most recent update.
Refund & Cancellation Policy
1. Canceling a subscription
You can cancel any subscription at any time from your billing page. When you cancel, you keep access until the end of the current billing period; the subscription does not renew after that.
2. Refunds
All sales are final. We don't issue refunds for partial billing periods, for unused credits, or for time you didn't use the service, except where required by law or where we explicitly state otherwise at checkout (for example, a promotional 7-day money-back window if one is offered for a specific plan).
Annual / multi-month plans are non-refundable once purchased. The discounted price reflects the up-front commitment; please be sure before you buy. If you cancel an annual plan, you keep access for the remainder of the period you paid for.
3. Promotional credits and coupons
Promotional credits, beta credits, and coupon-based discounts have no cash value, are not refundable, and may be subject to expiration dates and usage caps shown at the time of redemption.
4. Failed payments
If a renewal payment fails, we'll retry for a short period and email you. If the payment can't be collected, your subscription will pause and Alex features that require an active plan will become unavailable until billing is restored.
5. Disputes
If you think you've been charged in error, please email us first at hello@alex.study — we can usually resolve it faster than a chargeback. We reserve the right to suspend accounts where a chargeback is filed without first contacting us.
6. Account closure
You can request full account deletion from your account settings or by emailing hello@alex.study. Deletion stops any active subscription, removes your access immediately, and deletes your data on the timeline described in the Privacy Policy.
Contact
Questions about any of these policies? Email hello@alex.study.