Terms of service

Agreement to these terms

These terms are an agreement between you and EdGauge, LLC ("we" or "us"). They govern your use of EdGauge, the benchmarking platform we operate at https://edgauge.com, and everything that comes with it: the web application, reports, exports, the API, the AI assistant and any related service (together, "the service").

You agree to these terms when you register an account, tick the box that says you accept them, or use the service. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

If you accept these terms for an organization, such as a school district, county office of education or joint powers authority, you confirm that you have the authority to bind that organization. In that case "you" means the organization as well as the person acting for it, and the organization is the customer.

Where the service shows other pages, such as the privacy policy at https://edgauge.com/legal/privacy, the AI page at https://edgauge.com/legal/ai and the subprocessor list at https://edgauge.com/legal/subprocessors, those pages describe how the service works. They are part of the picture, but these terms are the agreement.

Who may use the service

The service is for organizations and the people who work for them: school districts, county offices of education, joint powers authorities and similar public-sector bodies, along with individuals who sign up on their own. It is a tool for work. You must be an adult, acting in a professional capacity, to use it.

The service is offered only to users in the United States. It is not directed to anyone outside the United States, and we make no claim that it complies with the laws of any other country.

The service

EdGauge compares the business side of California K-12 school districts. It takes measures of finance, staffing, salaries and operations from public sources, such as the California Department of Education and other government agencies, and from data that districts choose to contribute, and presents them side by side so that a district can see where it stands.

The service is information for benchmarking. It is not financial, accounting, legal, audit or investment advice, and it does not replace your own judgment or that of your advisors. Decisions about budgets, salaries, negotiations, board items and anything else remain yours.

We may change the service over time: add, change or retire measures, reports and features, and change how things look and work. Where a change removes something your plan includes, we will try to tell you in advance.

Accounts and seats

Your account

To use the service, a person registers with their name, email address and a password, or accepts an invitation from an organization. An account belongs to one named person. Do not share your credentials, and do not let anyone else sign in as you.

You are responsible for everything done under your account. Keep your password and any two-factor method (an authenticator app, a passkey, recovery codes or similar) secure. If you believe someone has used your account without permission, tell us promptly at [email protected].

Organizations and roles

An organization's administrators may invite people to join it, assign them a role and remove them. The roles are:

Each person an organization invites is a seat of that organization. The organization is responsible for whom it invites, for keeping its member list current, and for what its members do in the service. Some organizations require their members to use two-factor authentication; if yours does, you must set it up to keep access.

Plans and entitlements

Access is tiered. Plans are named free, member, contributor and premium. What a plan includes is described in the product or in the organization's order. A plan can unlock features such as additional measures, reports, exports and API access, and a role within an organization can limit what a person may do.

You may use only the features and data your plan and your role include. Do not try to reach anything beyond them, whether by guessing addresses, manipulating requests, using someone else's seat or any other means.

Acceptable use

Use the service only for lawful purposes and in line with these terms. You must not:

• upload student records or any personally identifiable information about students. The service is about district business operations and has no place for student data;
• upload personal information you do not have the right to share, or anything that infringes someone else's rights;
• try to defeat small-number suppression, re-identify a suppressed or confidential value, or combine queries, exports or reports to reconstruct one (see "Suppression of small numbers" below);
• scrape, crawl or copy the web application, or download data in bulk other than through the product's own exports or the API within its limits;
• probe, scan or test the service for vulnerabilities without our written permission, interfere with it, or try to get around its security or access controls;
• introduce malware or anything else harmful;
• impersonate another person or organization, or misrepresent your affiliation;
• resell, sublicense or redistribute the service or its data, or build a competing dataset from it (see "Using outputs" below);
• use the service to harass anyone, or in a way that is unlawful, misleading or harmful.

If you find a security problem, please tell us as described at https://edgauge.com/security.

API and MCP access

Some plans include a read-only API, which a user calls with a personal access token created in their settings, and a connection for AI assistants over the Model Context Protocol (MCP), authorized with OAuth.

Tokens and OAuth grants are secrets. A token is personal to the user who created it. You must not share a token, embed it in public code, or use it to give access to anyone outside your organization. Treat a token as you would your password; if one is exposed, revoke it in settings and tell us at [email protected].

Rate limits apply to the API and to MCP, and we may change them. We may revoke a token or an authorization at any time, for example when we see misuse, a security risk or an account closure.

Automated access to the service is allowed only through the API and MCP, within their limits. Do not drive the web application with scripts, and do not download data in bulk beyond the product's own exports.

Public data and benchmarks

Public data as-is

Much of the data in the service comes from government sources. Each value is cited with its source, and we work to load it faithfully. Even so, public data may contain errors, gaps, late revisions and changes in definition from the source, and the source may correct or restate it after we load it. We provide public data and the benchmarks we derive from it as-is, and we do not warrant that any value is accurate, complete or current.

Check a figure against its source before you rely on it for a decision.

Suppression of small numbers

To protect privacy and confidentiality, the service suppresses statistics drawn from too few districts. The threshold is set in the platform. A suppressed value is shown as suppressed in reports, exports, the API and the AI assistant alike. You must not try to defeat suppression, re-identify a suppressed or confidential value, or combine queries to reconstruct one.

AI answers

The service includes an assistant, "Ask EdGauge", which answers questions in natural language using the platform's data. It is built to cite the underlying records for every number it gives, so that you can check it.

AI output may be wrong or incomplete. The assistant can misread a question, pick the wrong measure or period, or leave something out. Check the citations before you rely on an answer, and do not treat an answer as advice.

Your questions are processed by AI providers as described at https://edgauge.com/legal/ai and https://edgauge.com/legal/subprocessors. Do not put student data or other sensitive personal information in a question.

Contributed data

A district may contribute its own figures that are not otherwise public, so that it and others can benchmark against them. Contribution is governed by a separate data sharing agreement, which an organization administrator or contributor accepts in the product before contributing. If that agreement and these terms conflict about contributed data, the data sharing agreement controls.

Contributed data goes through automated validation and review, and review by our staff where it is flagged, before it is published, and we may decline to publish, or may unpublish, a contribution that fails review. You must have the right to contribute everything you upload, and what you upload must not include student data or personal information you are not entitled to share.

Your data and our platform

Your data

You keep your rights in the data you upload or contribute. You grant us the license we need to operate the service: to store, process, validate, display and derive benchmarks from your data, and to do whatever else the data sharing agreement allows. Within an organization, data that one member uploads is available to the organization as its roles and plan allow.

Our platform

We own the service: the platform, software, design, documentation, the derived benchmarks, the measures and their definitions, and the compilation and arrangement of data in it. These terms do not transfer any of that to you. Public source data remains public; our ownership is of what we build on it, not of the government records themselves.

Feedback

If you send us feedback, suggestions or ideas about the service, we may use them freely and without obligation to you.

Using outputs

You may use the reports, exports, charts and other outputs you produce in the service for your internal work and for your public-sector purposes: board presentations, negotiations, public reporting and the like. When you share an output, attribute the figures to their source as the output cites them.

You must not resell, license or redistribute the platform's data, or an extract of it, as a dataset of its own or as part of a competing product. Posting a report to your board or giving a chart to a reporter is fine; publishing the database is not.

Privacy

We handle personal information, such as names, email addresses and usage records, under our privacy policy at https://edgauge.com/legal/privacy. The subprocessors that help us run the service are listed at https://edgauge.com/legal/subprocessors.

Fees

Fees, billing and renewal terms for paid plans will be stated in the organization's order or on the plan page. Free plans have no fee. This section is a placeholder in this draft; the terms that govern payment will be stated here, or in an order that refers to these terms, before any paid plan is sold.

Suspension and termination

By us

We may suspend or end your access, or an organization's access, if you breach these terms, if your account presents a security risk to the service or to other customers, for non-payment of a paid plan, or when the law requires it. Where it is practical, we will tell you first and give you a chance to fix the problem. Where it is not, such as a live security incident, we will tell you as soon as we reasonably can.

By you

You may stop using the service at any time. To close your account, use the setting in the product or write to [email protected]. An organization administrator may remove a member, and may ask us to close the organization's account. Closing an account does not by itself unpublish data that was contributed under a data sharing agreement; that agreement says what happens to it.

What survives

The sections on your data and our platform, using outputs, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnity, governing law and the general terms survive the end of this agreement, along with anything else that by its nature should.

Disclaimers

The service is provided as-is and as-available. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, whether express, implied or statutory, including any warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, title and non-infringement, and any warranty arising from course of dealing or usage of trade.

We do not warrant that the service will be accurate, complete, current, uninterrupted, error-free or secure, that any value, benchmark, report or AI answer is correct, or that any defect will be fixed. The service is information for benchmarking, not advice, and you use it at your own judgment and risk.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain disclaimers; in that case the disclaimers above apply to the extent the law allows.

Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows:

• neither we nor our members, officers, employees, contractors or suppliers will be liable to you for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive damages, or for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, loss of goodwill or the cost of substitute services, however caused and under any theory of liability, even if we were told they were possible; and
• our total liability to you for all claims arising out of or relating to the service or these terms will not exceed the fees you paid us for the service in the twelve months before the event that gave rise to the claim or, if you paid none, one hundred US dollars (US $100).

These limits apply together and reflect the basis on which we offer the service. They do not limit liability that the law does not allow to be limited.

Indemnity

To the extent permitted by law, and subject to any limit that applies to you as a public agency, you will defend and hold us harmless from third-party claims, and the reasonable costs that come with them, that arise from your misuse of the service in breach of these terms, or from data you upload or contribute, including a claim that you had no right to upload it. We will tell you promptly of any such claim and cooperate with you in its defense.

Nothing in this section asks a public agency to indemnify beyond what its governing law allows.

Public agencies and public records

Many of our customers are public agencies. Nothing in these terms waives a public agency's statutory protections, immunities or limits on liability, indemnity or appropriation. Where a provision of these terms would be unenforceable against a public agency under California law, it applies to the extent the law allows and no further.

A customer that is a public agency may have obligations under the California Public Records Act and similar laws. Nothing in these terms prevents you from complying with them.

Governing law and venue

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute arising out of or relating to these terms or the service will be brought in the state or federal courts located in California, and each of us consents to their jurisdiction. There is no arbitration clause in these terms.

Nothing in this section waives a public agency's statutory rights about venue or forum.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. Each version has a number and an effective date, both shown at the top of the page.

When a change is material, that is, it changes what you agreed to, we will ask you to accept the new version the next time you use the service in your browser, and you will not be able to go on using it there until you accept the new version or close your account. Minor changes, such as clarity, typos and contact details, take effect when posted and do not require a new acceptance.

Continued use of the service after a change takes effect means you accept the change, subject to the acceptance step described above for material changes.

Notices

We may send notices to the email address on your account or show them in the service. Keep your email address current.

Send notices to us at [email protected] or by mail to EdGauge, LLC, [mailing address to come]. A notice to us is effective when we receive it.

General terms

Entire agreement

These terms, together with any order for a paid plan and any data sharing agreement you accept, are the entire agreement between you and us about the service. The privacy policy and the other pages these terms link to describe how the service works; they are not part of the agreement. They replace any earlier agreement or understanding about the service. If an order or a data sharing agreement conflicts with these terms, the order controls as to fees and the plan, and the data sharing agreement controls as to contributed data.

Severability

If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, that part applies to the extent the law allows and the rest remains in force.

Assignment

You may not assign or transfer these terms, or any right under them, without our written consent, except that a public agency may assign them to a successor agency by operation of law. We may assign these terms to an affiliate or to a successor in a merger, acquisition or sale of the service, and we will tell you if we do.

No waiver

If we do not enforce a provision of these terms, that is not a waiver of our right to enforce it later. A waiver is effective only if it is in writing.

Relationship

We are independent contractors. These terms do not create a partnership, joint venture, agency or employment relationship between you and us.

Force majeure

Neither of us is liable for a delay or failure caused by events beyond our reasonable control, such as a natural disaster, utility failure, government action or a failure of a third-party service we depend on, provided we work to resume performance.

Headings

Headings are for convenience and do not affect interpretation. "Including" means "including without limitation".

Contact

EdGauge, LLC [mailing address to come] [email protected]

If you have a question about these terms, write to us before you accept them.