Terms of Service

thedebateprep.com is run by The Debate Prep, an independent project built by a competitive debater. Contact us at thedebateprepsupport@gmail.com or through the contact page.

• Students under 13 need a parent's or guardian's approval. We ask your age when you sign up. If you're under 13, a parent or guardian approves by email before you can use the app, and some features are off, and joining a coach's team needs a separate approval from the parent (see the Privacy Policy). Tell us your real age.
• Coach accounts are for people 13 or older. To pick Coach as your account type, you confirm you're 13 or older and that you coach or teach debate.
• Use your own personal email address. Some student school email addresses can’t be used to sign up, so please use a personal email instead.
• Give us true information, including your real age and, if you’re under 13, a real parent’s or guardian’s email address. If you give us false information, you are responsible for what follows, and we may delete the account.
• Keep your password private. You are responsible for what happens on your account.

• Coaching tools use credits. New accounts get a starting amount, and free accounts get a smaller monthly amount after that. The current amounts are shown on the Upgrade page.
• If a coaching request fails, it costs no credits.
• Credits have no cash value and can’t be sold, transferred or refunded.

• Renewal: Premium is billed monthly or yearly by Stripe, and renews automatically at the end of each period until you cancel. The price is shown before you pay.
• Cancelling: you can cancel at any time from Settings. Cancelling stops the next renewal.
• Price lock: if we raise the Premium price, the new price applies only to new subscriptions. While your subscription stays active on the same plan, it renews at the price you signed up at. If you cancel and it ends, or switch between monthly and yearly, the price at that time applies.
• At the end of the period: you keep Premium until the end of the period you paid for. Then your account moves to the free plan with its monthly credits. Unused Premium credits don't carry over. Your work stays in your account.
• Refunds: we don't offer refunds for partial periods, except where required by law.
• Failed payments: if a renewal payment fails, Stripe tries again. If it keeps failing, your account moves to the free plan.

• Who pays: a team's head coach can buy Premium seats for the team, priced per seat each month, or as a monthly team package: one price for up to a set number of seats, cheaper than the same number of per-seat plans, where each seat gets the same Premium features and monthly credits as a student's own Premium. A team has either per-seat billing or a team package, never both. There is no package above 20 seats, so a team that needs more pays per seat for every seat, up to 50 seats a team. The coach pays, not the students. The price is shown before you pay. If you're under 18, get a parent's or guardian's permission before you buy anything, and use a payment card you're allowed to use.
• Giving seats: the head coach chooses which students on the team get a seat, and can take a seat back or move it to another student at any time. A student with a seat has Premium while the seat is theirs. A seat can't be given to a student who already pays for Premium, and a student with a seat who starts paying for Premium themselves gives the seat back.
• When a seat ends: if the seat is taken back, the student leaves the team, or the team's seats end, the student goes back to the free plan with the free credits they had before. Their work stays in their account.
• Renewal: per-seat billing and team packages are both billed monthly, by Stripe. Both renew automatically until the coach cancels. Each seat's credits refill every month. Unused credits don't carry over.
• Changing or cancelling: the head coach can change the number of per-seat seats, or cancel either kind, at any time from the team's page. Extra seats can't be added to a team package. Added seats are charged straight away for the rest of the month. Removed seats, and cancelling, take effect at the end of the month already paid for. If more seats are given out than are kept, the most recently given ones are taken back then. A team can't be deleted while its seats are still being paid for. To switch to a different package you email us.
• Refunds and failed payments: the same as Premium above. If payments keep failing, the team's seats end.

Your cases, speeches, flows and other work belong to you. You give us permission to store and process them only so we can run the app for you, including sending them to the services listed in the Privacy Policy when you use a coaching tool.

• Feedback, practice opponents and judges, Refute Tables and Evidence Finder results are generated automatically. They can be wrong.
• Always open and check a source yourself before you use it in a round.
• Treat feedback as practice advice, not a promise about how a judge will decide or how you will do.
• You are responsible for following your league’s and your school’s rules on academic honesty, including any rules about using tools like this one.

The National Speech & Debate Association (NSDA) lets students use generative tools, like this app, to help with research and ideas. In debate events, its rules say you can't cite a generated answer as a source, and any evidence you quote or paraphrase in a round must trace back to an original source you can show on request. In Extemp, Original Oratory and Informative, you can't quote or paraphrase generated text at all. (NSDA's November 2025 rules minutes.)

What the app does, honestly:

• The Case Builder and weighing feedback comment on your own words. Their examples are about a different topic, and weighing comes as an outline with blanks for you to fill in, so the argument stays yours.
• Speech Feedback comments on your speech, and can suggest new wording for a sentence. That wording is generated, so put it in your own words before you use it in a round.
• Evidence Finder finds real sources and links to each one. Its short summaries are generated: open the source, read it, and cite the source, not the summary.
• Refute Tables, practice opponents and the rebuttal drill do write argument text. It’s practice material and a starting point for research, never something to read in a round.

Three rules for every round:

1. Write your own case.
2. Cite only the original source.
3. Never read generated text in a round.

If your league, tournament or school has stricter rules, follow theirs.

These apply to coaches and assistant coaches on a team, and to anyone who views students' work through sharing:

• Only invite students who are on your own team.
• Don’t share students’ work, or anything you learn from it, with anyone outside the team.
• A student under 13 can be on your team only after a parent or guardian separately approves it, and only on teams where we have switched this on. Until then you see nothing about the student except that a join is waiting. You see them by first name and last initial. Don’t try to find out more about them, such as their email address or school.
• If a parent stops sharing, or the student leaves, your access to their work ends straight away. Stop using anything you copied or noted from it, and don’t pass it on.
• You are responsible for following your school’s or program’s rules when you recommend the app to students.

Please don't:

• try to break, overload or get around the credit system, or access other people’s accounts;
• use the app to harass anyone or to create content that is illegal or hateful;
• copy, resell or scrape the app or its content.

We can suspend accounts that break these rules.

You can delete your account at any time in Settings. We may close accounts that break these terms. If we ever shut the service down, we'll give notice in the app first.

A parent or guardian who approves an account for a child under 13 agrees to these terms on the child's behalf, and is responsible for the child's use of the app. They can see the account or delete it at any time from the link in their email. Approving the account does not approve a coach's team: joining a team needs its own approval from the parent, which they can take back at any time from the link in the email we send them (see the Privacy Policy).

The app is provided "as is". We work to keep it running and your work safe, but we can't promise it will always be available or error-free.

As far as the law allows, we aren't responsible for:

• indirect losses, such as a lost round;
• what users write, share or do with the app, or how they use what it gives them;
• anything that results from someone giving us false information, such as a wrong age, or an email address that belongs to someone else or isn’t really a parent’s.

If you break these terms or the law while using the app, you agree to cover the reasonable costs that causes us, as far as the law allows. For a child under 13, that applies to the parent or guardian who approved the account.

Nothing in these terms limits rights you have under laws that can't be changed by agreement, or our own duties under those laws, such as privacy laws that protect children.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, USA.

These terms take effect on 10/19/26. If we change them in a way that matters, we'll change that date, list what changed on the past versions page, and show a notice in the app the next time you sign in.

Questions about these terms? Email thedebateprepsupport@gmail.com or use the contact page.