Terms of Service
Last updated October 2026
Welcome
Hearth is where your campus hangs out: a chat for every course you add, campus channels, clubs, study sessions, shared notes, and messages, all verified by your school email. These terms are the agreement between you and Hearth when you use our app or website. They're written to be read, not skimmed past: they cover who can join, what you can post, and what we do to keep Hearth a good place to be.
Who can join
Hearth is for people who are part of a campus. You must be at least 16 years old and enrolled at or affiliated with a supported university. Your university email address is how we check. You sign up with it and confirm it from your inbox, and that places you in your campus community, and only that one. If you are under 18, please read these terms with a parent or guardian.
Your account
Your account is yours alone. Keep your password to yourself, don't let anyone else post as you, and don't create accounts for other people. You're responsible for what happens under your handle, so tell us right away if you think someone else has gotten into your account.
What you post is yours
Everything you share on Hearth belongs to you: messages, notes, files, events, polls, your course list, your profile. To run the service, you give us permission to store it, back it up, and show it to the classmates you shared it with. That permission exists so Hearth can work; it doesn't let us sell your content or use it for advertising, and it ends for anything you delete.
What you're responsible for
Only share things you have the right to share. Your own notes are always fair game; a scanned textbook chapter, a professor's slide deck, or a leaked exam is not. You're responsible for what you post, and if it breaks these terms or our Community Guidelines, we may remove it.
Copyright, and how to get something taken down
Hearth hosts what students upload, and we take copyright seriously. If you own the rights to something posted here without your permission, tell us and we will act. Email dmca@uhearth.app with: your contact details; enough detail to find the material, such as a link or the course and the file name; a statement that you believe in good faith the use is not authorised; a statement, under penalty of perjury, that the information is accurate and you are the owner or authorised to act for them; and your signature, typed is fine. We remove or disable access to material that is properly reported, and we tell the person who posted it. If you think your material was removed by mistake, you can send a counter notice to the same address and we will pass it on. Accounts that infringe repeatedly are terminated. Our designated agent for copyright notices is Raghav Kedia, doing business as Hearth, 625 Cantrill Dr, Apt 146, Davis, CA 95618, dmca@uhearth.app.
The ground rules
Our Community Guidelines are part of these terms, and they spell out what being a good classmate looks like on Hearth. The short version: no harassment, no hate, no spam, no impersonation, no sexual content, take self-harm concerns seriously, and keep your schoolwork honest.
Reporting and enforcement
Every message and profile on Hearth can be reported in the app, with a category so we can sort out the urgent things first. A person reads every report. We aim to get to all of them within a day, and we look at anything flagged as a safety risk before anything else. Depending on what we find, we may remove content, warn the person, or suspend or ban the account, permanently for serious or repeated violations, including repeated copyright infringement. We also apply gentle rate limits so no one can flood a channel or the report queue.
Hearth and your university
Hearth is an independent student space. We're not affiliated with, run by, or endorsed by your university, and nothing on Hearth connects to your school's official systems. University names are used only to say which campus a community belongs to. Your course list is entered by you and managed by you. We never pull your grades, transcripts, enrollment records or school accounts from your university, and no official record of yours reaches Hearth. If you choose to type your own marks into the grade estimator, that is your own note to yourself: it is stored privately, only you can read it, and it is not a school record.
Leaving Hearth
You can delete your account any time from Settings in the app. Deletion is immediate and permanent: your profile, messages, files, courses, and everything else tied to your account are erased. There's no archive we quietly keep. Two kinds of thing survive, and we'd rather say so than let you find out. If a classmate forwarded one of your messages, that forward is their message, in their room, and it keeps the text. It just stops being credited to you. And anything you made for a class or a club to share and keep using (a flashcard deck, a card in one, a deadline on a course calendar, a link you added, a club announcement, a club or a channel you started) stays where it is, with your name taken off it. Deleting your account shouldn't empty your study group's deck or wipe a deadline off everyone else's calendar. Everything that was yours alone is gone: your profile, your messages, your files, your courses, your blocks, your push tokens.
Our service to you
The core of Hearth is free for students, carries no ads, and your data is never for sale. We work hard to keep Hearth fast and available, but like any online service we can't promise it will never hiccup. Hearth is provided as is, and features may change as the product grows. If we make a change that meaningfully affects you, we'll tell you in the app first.
When we can close an account
We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms or the Community Guidelines, that infringes copyright repeatedly, or that puts other students at risk. For anything short of a serious safety problem we'll tell you what happened and why. We can also stop offering Hearth, or any part of it, and if we ever do we'll give you notice in the app and time to take your data with you.
The fine print, in plain words
To the extent the law allows, Hearth isn't liable for indirect damages, things like lost data from an outage or what another user says or does, and our total liability to you is limited to the amount you have paid us, which for the free service is nothing. If something you do on Hearth causes a legal claim against us, for example posting something you didn't have the right to post, you agree to cover the reasonable cost of dealing with it. Nothing in these terms takes away rights the law guarantees you, and if any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.
Which law applies
These terms are governed by the laws of California, without regard to its conflict of laws rules, and any dispute goes to the state or federal courts located in Yolo County, California. If you live somewhere whose law gives you the right to bring a claim locally, this doesn't take that away.
Payments and refunds
Hearth is free. There are no paid features, subscriptions, in-app purchases, or fees of any kind, hidden or otherwise, so there is nothing to refund. If that ever changes, we'll tell you in the app before it does, every price will be shown before you pay it, and these terms will say how refunds work.
Changes to these terms
If we update these terms, we'll change the date at the top, and for anything significant we'll let you know in the app before it takes effect. Continuing to use Hearth after that means you accept the update.
Talk to us
Hearth is operated by Raghav Kedia, doing business as Hearth, 625 Cantrill Dr, Apt 146, Davis, CA 95618. Questions about these terms, or something that doesn't seem right? Email hello@uhearth.app. A human reads it.