Smart Home from ScratchStudent login

Terms of Service

Effective date: {{EFFECTIVE_DATE}}

These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a legal agreement between you and {{BUSINESS_LEGAL_NAME}} ("we," "us," or "our"). They cover your use of the Smart Home from Scratch website at {{WEBSITE_DOMAIN}}, your account, and the Smart Home from Scratch online course. In these Terms, all of that together is called "the Course."

Please read these Terms. By buying the Course or using the website, you agree to them. If you don't agree, please don't use the Course. When you buy, we record which version of these Terms, the Refund Policy, and the Privacy Policy you agreed to, and when.

Two other pages are part of these Terms. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle your personal information. Our Refund Policy explains our 7-day money-back guarantee.

1. Who we are

Smart Home from Scratch is offered by {{BUSINESS_LEGAL_NAME}}, based in {{BUSINESS_COUNTRY}}.

  • Email: {{CONTACT_EMAIL}}

2. Who can use the Course

To buy the Course, you must be at least 18 years old, or the age of majority where you live if that's higher.

If you're at least 13 but under that age, you may use the Course only with a parent or legal guardian. That parent or guardian must agree to these Terms for you and is responsible for your use of the Course.

The Course is not for children under 13. Children under 13 may not buy the Course or use an account.

3. What the Course is

Smart Home from Scratch is a self-paced online course. It teaches beginners basic electronics and home automation with a NodeMCU ESP8266 microcontroller board: sensors, relays, a display, a card reader, and voice control.

  • The lessons are written, with diagrams. There are no videos, no live classes, and no community or forum.
  • The Course is the lessons only. It does not include any electronic parts, tools, or hardware. You buy those yourself, from sellers of your choice (see Section 10).
  • You work at your own pace. There are no deadlines.
  • The Course doesn't include personal tutoring, coaching, or review of your circuits or code. For help with your account, access, or billing, see our Support page or email {{CONTACT_EMAIL}}.

Any time estimate we give, such as how long a lesson or the whole Course takes, is only an estimate. Your pace may be different.

4. Your account

You need an account to use the Course. There is no separate signup: your account is created when your purchase is confirmed, and you log in with the email address you paid with.

You agree to:

  • give us your real name and an email address you control, and keep them up to date
  • keep your password private and not share your login with anyone
  • tell us promptly at {{CONTACT_EMAIL}} if you think someone else has used your account

You're responsible for keeping your password private and for any activity on your account that results from sharing your login.

5. Your license to use the Course

When you buy the Course, we give you a license to use the lessons for your own learning, for as long as your access lasts under Section 8. The license is:

  • personal: it's for you only
  • non-exclusive: other people can buy the Course too
  • non-transferable and non-sublicensable: you can't sell it, give it away, or let someone else use it

You may:

  • read the lessons as often as you like, on your own devices
  • take your own notes

You may not:

  • share your login or let anyone else use your account
  • resell, rent, give away, or transfer your access
  • copy, republish, distribute, or post the lessons or large parts of them anywhere, word for word or lightly reworded. This includes websites, code repositories, social media, shared drives, and other courses.
  • use the lessons to build or train an AI model, or add them to a dataset
  • remove copyright or ownership notices

You can use the code and the circuits freely. You may copy, change, and use the code examples and the circuits in the lessons in your own projects, including commercial ones. You don't need to ask us or credit us.

That permission covers the code and the circuits, not the lesson text, diagrams, and explanations around them. It doesn't let you collect them to republish the Course. Some examples use third-party open-source libraries or tools, and those come with their own licenses.

6. Price, payment, and taxes

  • The Course is a one-time payment. It's not a subscription, and there are no recurring charges.
  • The price is the one shown at checkout, in U.S. dollars.
  • We sell the Course through Hotmart. Hotmart takes the payment in its own name, and your card details go straight to Hotmart and never reach our servers.
  • Depending on where you live, sales tax or a similar tax may apply. If it does, Hotmart adds it at checkout, collects it, and issues the receipt for your purchase.
  • We may change the price of the Course in the future. A price change never affects what you already paid.
  • If your payment fails or is reversed, your access may be removed.
  • If you buy the Course again with an account that already has access, we keep your first purchase and refund the second one in full, automatically.

7. Refunds

We offer a 7-day money-back guarantee. Ask within 7 days of your purchase date and you get a full refund, with no reason needed. For your first purchase, you can refund it yourself with the Refund my purchase button on your Account page; you can always ask by email instead. After a refund, your access to the Course is removed.

More than 7 days after purchase, we don't give refunds, except where the law requires one. Our Refund Policy has the details.

8. What "lifetime access" means

"Lifetime access" means you can use the Course for as long as we offer it. It refers to the lifetime of the Course, not to your lifetime or ours. Your access has no expiration date, and you won't have to pay anything more.

We plan to keep offering the Course. If we ever decide to stop, we'll email the address on your account at least 90 days before your access ends. You'll keep full access until then, so you have time to finish lessons and save your own notes and code.

Your access can also end earlier if:

  • you get a refund, or your payment is reversed (for example, through a chargeback)
  • you ask us to delete your account
  • we end it under Section 14 because you broke these Terms

Short interruptions for maintenance, updates, or problems outside our control don't end your access. We'll work to keep them short.

9. Course updates

Software, parts, and the online services the Course uses change over time, and the Course changes with them. To keep it accurate and useful, we may add, update, reorganize, replace, or remove lessons. Updates are part of your access at no extra cost.

Some lessons listed in the curriculum may still be in progress when you buy. They become part of your access, at no extra cost, when we publish them. We don't promise dates for new or updated lessons.

10. Parts, third-party tools, and their costs

To follow the Course you need electronic parts — a microcontroller board, modules, a breadboard, wires, and small components — and tools and services made by other companies. These include the Arduino IDE, software libraries, a voice assistant, and a cloud service that connects the two.

  • The Course price doesn't include the parts. You buy them from sellers of your choice and pay those sellers directly. We don't sell parts, and we aren't responsible for their price, availability, quality, shipping, or defects. The parts list in the Course describes generic parts; the exact parts you receive may differ from the ones shown.
  • Our refund covers the Course only. It doesn't cover parts, tools, or anything else you bought from someone else, whether or not you finish the Course.
  • Each third-party tool and service has its own terms, privacy policy, and prices. It's up to you to read and follow them. Some have free plans; others cost money. You pay those companies directly.
  • Those companies can change their features, free plans, and prices at any time, or stop offering a service. We don't control those changes and aren't responsible for them or for how those tools work.
  • A part, tool, or service that appears in a lesson isn't necessarily one we're affiliated with or endorse.

11. No guaranteed results

We work hard to make the Course useful, but we can't promise any particular outcome. In particular, we don't guarantee that you will:

  • get a job, a promotion, clients, or freelance work
  • earn any money
  • finish the Course, or get any particular circuit or device working, within any particular time

What you get from the Course depends on you: the time and effort you put in, your background, the parts you buy, and your own choices. The builds we describe on our website are what the lessons cover. They are not a prediction of what you will build.

12. Electricity, safety, and what you build

The Course is educational. It is not professional electrical advice, and it doesn't make you a licensed electrician.

  • You build at your own risk. Electronic parts can overheat, fail, or be damaged, and a wiring mistake can damage your parts or the computer they are plugged into. You're responsible for how you build, power, and use your circuits.
  • Household (wall) voltage can injure or kill and can start a fire. One lesson describes switching a plug-in lamp with a relay. It is optional, and nothing else in the Course depends on it. If you choose to do it, you do so at your own risk. If you have any doubt, don't do it, and have a licensed electrician do any work on household wiring.
  • You're responsible for following the electrical codes, laws, and rental or insurance rules that apply where you live. Changing a building's fixed wiring usually requires a licensed electrician.
  • The builds in the Course are learning projects on a breadboard. They are not finished, certified products. Don't leave them running unattended, and don't use them where a failure could cause injury, damage, or loss, such as for security, safety, heating, or medical purposes.
  • If a minor uses the Course under Section 2, the parent or guardian is responsible for supervising all hands-on work.
  • You're responsible for the devices you connect to your network and to online services. That includes keeping your Wi-Fi password and API keys secret, any charges on your accounts with other services, and following the laws that apply.
  • The code and circuits in the lessons are there to teach. Check them against your own parts before you rely on them.

13. Things you agree not to do

When using the website or the Course, you agree not to:

  • attack, probe, overload, or try to break into the website, its servers, or its database
  • test the website for security weaknesses without our written permission
  • scrape, crawl, or bulk-download the website or the lessons, by hand or with a bot, script, or other automated tool
  • get around, disable, or interfere with logins, access controls, attempt limits, or other security features
  • access parts of the Course you haven't paid for, or use someone else's account
  • break the license limits in Section 5
  • use the Course or the website for anything illegal or to harm anyone

14. Ending your access

You can stop using the Course at any time. You can also ask us to delete your account by emailing {{CONTACT_EMAIL}}. Deleting your account ends your access. It doesn't come with a refund unless you ask for one within the 7-day window in our Refund Policy.

We may suspend or end your account if you break these Terms, for example by sharing your login, reselling access, republishing lessons, or attacking the website. We may also suspend access for a short time when we need to protect the website or other users while we look into a problem.

If we end your access because you broke these Terms, you won't get a refund. The exceptions are a request made within the 7-day window in our Refund Policy, or a refund the law requires.

Some sections keep applying even after your access ends, because of what they cover. These are Sections 11 and 12 and Sections 15 through 22.

15. Intellectual property

The Course and the website belong to {{BUSINESS_LEGAL_NAME}} or the people who license content to us. That includes the lessons, text, explanations, examples, exercises, design, and the Smart Home from Scratch name. Copyright, trademark, and other laws protect them. We keep all rights except the ones these Terms give you, including the code-snippet permission in Section 5.

The devices and code you create are yours. We don't claim ownership of your projects.

If you send us ideas or feedback, we may use them to improve the Course without owing you anything.

16. Disclaimers

The Course and the website are provided "as is" and "as available." As far as the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied. That includes implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

We don't promise that the website will always be available or free of errors, or that the lessons will be free of mistakes. We also don't promise that anything you build by following the lessons will work, be safe or secure, or meet your needs.

Some states don't allow certain warranties to be disclaimed, so parts of this section may not apply to you. Nothing in this section limits our 7-day money-back guarantee.

17. Limitation of liability

As far as the law allows:

  • We won't be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages. We also won't be liable for lost profits, lost income, lost data, or business interruption. This applies to anything arising out of or related to the Course, the website, or these Terms, even if we were told such damages were possible.
  • We won't be liable for charges, data loss, security incidents, damage to parts or property, or other harm connected with third-party parts, tools, and services, or with circuits, devices, and code you build or use.
  • Our total liability to you for all claims related to the Course, the website, or these Terms is limited to the amount you paid us for the Course.

Some states don't allow these limits, so they may not apply to you. Nothing in these Terms limits any liability that the law doesn't allow to be limited.

18. Indemnity

Someone might bring a claim against us because you broke these Terms, misused the Course or the website, or built or used a circuit or device that caused harm. If that happens, you agree to cover our reasonable losses and costs from that claim, including reasonable attorneys' fees.

19. Governing law and where disputes are resolved

These Terms are governed by the laws of {{GOVERNING_LAW}}, where we are based, without regard to conflict-of-laws rules.

If you have a problem, please email us first. Most issues can be solved quickly that way.

Any lawsuit about these Terms, the Course, or the website must be filed in {{VENUE}}. Either of us may still bring an individual claim in small claims court where you live, if the claim qualifies.

Nothing in this section takes away consumer protections that the law of the place where you live gives you and that can't be waived by agreement, including any right you have to bring a claim in the courts where you live.

20. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. When we do, we'll post the new version on this page and change the effective date at the top. If a change is significant, we'll tell you before it takes effect, by email or with a notice on the website.

Changes apply going forward only. A change won't:

  • make you pay more for a purchase you already made
  • shorten the refund window that applied when you bought
  • apply to a dispute that started before the change

If you keep using the Course after a change takes effect, the updated Terms apply to you.

21. Severability

If a court finds any part of these Terms unenforceable, that part will be limited or removed only as much as necessary. The rest of these Terms stays in effect.

22. Entire agreement

These Terms, together with our Privacy Policy and Refund Policy, are the entire agreement between you and us about the Course. They replace any earlier agreements about it.

If we don't enforce part of these Terms right away, we can still enforce it later. You may not transfer your rights under these Terms to anyone else. We may transfer ours as part of a sale, merger, or reorganization of our business, and these Terms keep protecting you after that.

23. Contact us

For questions about these Terms:

  • Email: {{CONTACT_EMAIL}}