Terms of Use

What Chesscraft is — and isn't.

Chesscraft is a software-as-a-service platform built for chess coaches and their students. It is not a public chess server, a free tactics trainer, or a social network. We don't host open lobbies, public ratings ladders, or anonymous play.

What we do provide: a live lesson studio with shared boards and annotation; a roster of students with rating history, repertoire notes, and games imported from Lichess and Chess.com; puzzle packs and homework assignments; classroom rooms with live presence; coach-facing billing through Stripe Connect; and an optional public coach profile so families can find you.

The legal entity behind the Services is Chesscraft (referred to in these Terms as "Chesscraft", "we", "us", or "our"). You can reach us at [email protected].

Accounts and eligibility.

To use most of the Services you need an account. You agree to provide accurate information, keep your password secure, and not share your login with anyone. You are responsible for everything that happens under your account.

Age and consent

You must be at least 13 years old to use Chesscraft. If you are under the age of majority in your jurisdiction, you may only use the Services with the involvement and consent of a parent or legal guardian.

Student accounts created by a coach

Coaches can invite students to Chesscraft through an invitation link. When a coach invites a student who is a minor, the coach warrants that they have obtained the necessary consent from a parent or legal guardian for that student to use the Services and to share lesson-related data with the coach. We rely on that representation.

Parents and guardians can contact us at [email protected] at any time to review, correct, or delete the data associated with a minor's account.

Two-factor authentication

We strongly recommend enabling two-factor authentication on your account, especially if you are a coach with paid students, billing connected, or a public coach profile.

Roles on the platform.

Chesscraft is organised around a small number of roles. The role you hold determines what you can see and do.

Coach

Manages a roster of students, runs the lesson studio, builds puzzle packs, assigns homework, connects Stripe for payouts, and may publish a public profile.

Student

Joins through a coach's invitation, takes lessons, solves assigned puzzles, and can connect their own Lichess or Chess.com account to share games with their coach.

Parent / Guardian

Provides consent for a minor student, may receive digests of lesson activity, and can request access, correction, or deletion of the student's data on their behalf.

Club / Academy Admin

Operates a multi-coach studio with a shared roster and reporting. Club admins agree to these Terms on behalf of the club and its coaches.

Roles, features, and feature flags may evolve. We reserve the right to add, change, or remove capabilities at any time.

What you may not do.

You agree not to use the Services to do any of the following:

• Scrape, mirror, automate, rate-limit-circumvent, or otherwise abuse our platform, our APIs, or the third-party APIs we integrate with (including Lichess, Chess.com, and YouTube).
• Cheat in lessons, puzzle attempts, or assigned work — including by using engines, opening books, endgame tablebases, or other people to do the work for you. Coaching only works when the work is yours.
• Harass, bully, threaten, defame, dox, or otherwise harm any user — including in classroom chat, annotations, lesson notes, and live queue interactions.
• Impersonate another person, falsely claim a chess title or rating you do not hold, or misrepresent your coaching credentials.
• Upload, post, or share content that is unlawful, obscene, sexually explicit, defamatory, infringing, or otherwise inappropriate — particularly in a setting where minors may be present.
• Share student data (including game history, ratings, or lesson notes) outside the platform without that student's — or their guardian's — explicit permission.
• Probe, scan, or test the vulnerability of our systems except under a coordinated disclosure arrangement at [email protected].
• Use the Services to send spam, run a competing service, or process payments outside of our Stripe Connect integration in order to evade platform fees.

We may take any action we consider appropriate, including removing content, suspending or closing accounts, and cooperating with law enforcement, when these rules are broken.

Your content stays yours.

You retain ownership of the content you bring to Chesscraft — your PGNs, your studies, your puzzle packs, your lesson notes, your coaching curriculum, and anything else you upload or create using the Services ("Your Content").

To run the Services, we need permission to host and process Your Content. You grant Chesscraft a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to host, store, copy, transmit, display, and adapt Your Content solely for the purpose of operating the Services for you and the users you share it with (such as your students). This license ends when you delete the content or your account, subject to short technical retention for backups.

If you publish a public coach profile or share content into a public classroom or queue, that content is — by necessity — visible to people outside your private studio. Use your judgement.

Chesscraft's own branding, logos, design, code, documentation, and the Services themselves remain our property and may not be copied, resold, or redistributed without our written permission, except as permitted by applicable open-source licenses we publish.

We may remove content that breaches these Terms, infringes third-party rights, or that we are required by law to take down.

About our AI-assisted features.

Some Chesscraft features — including position roasts, evaluation summaries, lesson recaps, and parent digests — are generated by large language models or other AI services operated by third-party providers. These features are advisory only.

AI output can be wrong, incomplete, biased, or outdated. Treat it the way you'd treat a junior assistant's first draft: useful, but not authoritative. Do not rely on it for decisions where accuracy matters without your own review.

Do not paste confidential, sensitive, or personal information into AI prompts beyond what is necessary for the chess context. Inputs and outputs may be temporarily retained for debugging and safety review, as described in our Privacy Policy.

Third-party integrations.

Chesscraft works alongside other chess platforms. Connecting them is optional but enables much of what makes the studio useful.

• Lichess — OAuth-based integration. You authorise Chesscraft to read your games and study metadata. You can revoke this at any time from Lichess's settings, or via the Integrations page in Chesscraft.
• Chess.com — username-based integration. You provide your public Chess.com username; we import your public game archive on a scheduled basis.
• YouTube — used to import playlists of coaching content into a course. We read public playlist metadata only.
• Stripe — used for billing and payouts (see the next section).

Each integration is governed by the third party's own terms and privacy policy in addition to ours. We are not responsible for the availability, accuracy, or behaviour of those third-party services, and we may disable or change an integration at any time.

Payments and Stripe Connect.

All payments between coaches and students on Chesscraft are processed by Stripe through Stripe Connect. When a coach enables billing, they are creating a separate Stripe Connected Account and agreeing to Stripe's Connected Account Agreement and Services Agreement.

For coaches

You are the merchant of record for your students' payments. You set your own prices, packages, and refund policy. Chesscraft charges a platform fee on top of Stripe's processing fees; the current rate is shown in your billing settings and may change with notice.

You are responsible for your own tax obligations, including sales tax, VAT, and income tax where applicable. We are not your accountant.

For students and parents

Refunds, cancellations, and disputes about a specific lesson or package are between you and the coach who provides the service. Please contact your coach first. We can intervene in cases of clear abuse, but we are not a party to your contract with the coach.

Chargebacks and fraud

Excessive chargebacks, suspected card fraud, or use of the platform to launder payments may result in immediate suspension of payouts and account closure, with cooperation with Stripe and, where appropriate, law enforcement.

Subscriptions and the free tier.

Chesscraft offers a free tier ("Pawn") that supports up to three students per coach, and paid tiers ("Knight" and "King") for working coaches and clubs. Current pricing and feature breakdowns are published on our pricing page and may change with reasonable notice.

Paid subscriptions renew automatically until cancelled. You can cancel at any time from your settings; cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing period and we don't pro-rate partial periods unless required by law.

If you stop paying or cancel, we may downgrade your studio to the free tier, restrict access to paid features, and — after a reasonable grace period — archive or delete data that exceeds the free tier limits. We'll tell you before that happens.

Suspension and termination.

You can close your account at any time from settings or by emailing [email protected]. What happens to your data is described in the Privacy Policy.

We may suspend or terminate your account if we reasonably believe that:

• You have breached these Terms;
• You pose a safety, security, or legal risk to other users, our partners, or us;
• You have committed payment fraud or repeated chargebacks;
• Your account has been inactive for a prolonged period; or
• Providing the Services to you has become unlawful or commercially unreasonable.

Where it is safe and lawful to do so, we will try to give you notice and a chance to respond. You can appeal a suspension by writing to [email protected]. Our decision on appeals is final, although your statutory rights are unaffected.

Service provided "as is".

To the maximum extent permitted by law, the Services are provided "as is" and "as available" without warranties of any kind, either express or implied, including (without limitation) implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, reliability, or non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the Services will be uninterrupted, secure, error-free, or that any data you store with us will be preserved without loss. Maintain your own backups of anything irreplaceable.

Limitation of liability.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, Chesscraft and its officers, employees, contractors, and partners will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, or punitive damages — including loss of profits, revenue, goodwill, data, or business opportunity — arising out of or related to your use of the Services, even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.

Our total aggregate liability to you for any claim arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Services will not exceed the greater of (a) the amounts you paid Chesscraft in the twelve (12) months preceding the event giving rise to the claim, or (b) one hundred US dollars (US$100).

Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion or limitation of certain damages, so the above limitations may not apply to you in full.

Indemnification.

You agree to defend, indemnify, and hold harmless Chesscraft and its officers, employees, contractors, and partners from any third-party claims, damages, liabilities, costs, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) that arise out of or relate to: (a) your use or misuse of the Services; (b) Your Content; (c) your breach of these Terms; or (d) your violation of any law or third-party right.

Governing law and dispute resolution.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the jurisdiction in which Chesscraft is established, without regard to its conflict-of-laws principles. The courts of that jurisdiction will have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute that is not resolved informally, except where mandatory consumer law in your country of residence provides otherwise.

Before filing any legal action, you agree to first contact us at [email protected] and make a good-faith effort to resolve the dispute informally. We commit to doing the same.

If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, the remaining provisions remain in full force and effect.

Changes to these Terms.

We may update these Terms as the Services evolve. When we make material changes, we'll update the "Last updated" date above and notify you by email and a banner in your dashboard at least fourteen (14) days before the changes take effect, unless the change is required by law or addresses a security or fraud risk that requires immediate action.

Your continued use of the Services after the effective date of the updated Terms constitutes acceptance of those changes. If you don't agree, you should stop using the Services and close your account.

How to reach us.

Questions about these Terms? Concerns about another user's behaviour? A legal notice you need to serve us? Write to:

General

[email protected]

Legal notices

[email protected]

Account appeals

[email protected]

Security disclosures

[email protected]

Privacy questions

[email protected]