Terms of Service

Last updated July 28, 2026

Using Compass

Compass (operating as Compass College Counseling, run by Cem Kocaoglu) provides tools and AI-assisted guidance to help you plan college applications. It is offered to students in the United States. You’re responsible for the accuracy of what you enter. Our Privacy Policy explains what we collect and is part of these Terms; because most Compass users are minors, please read both together with a parent or guardian.

Your account, age, and parents

You must be 13 or older to use Compass; you confirm this when you accept these Terms. We do not knowingly allow accounts for children under 13, and we delete any we find.
If you are under 18, use Compass only with your parent or guardian’s permission, and review these Terms with them. A parent or guardian who starts the subscription accepts these Terms for themselves and on the student’s behalf.
Sign-in is via your Google account, so keeping that account secure protects your Compass account too. Optional two-factor authentication is available in Settings.
Provide accurate information and don’t share access to your account.

Subscription, trial, and payment

Compass is a paid subscription: $20/month or $150/year, and every plan starts with a 30-day free trial (one free trial per account; re-subscribing after a cancellation starts billing right away). Using the dashboard requires an active trial or subscription.
The purchaser is a parent or guardian: the student enters their parent’s name and email, and we email the parent a private Stripe checkout link. A card is collected at checkout, there is no charge during the trial, and the plan converts to paid automatically when the trial ends unless it’s canceled first. Plans renew automatically each period until canceled.
Canceling: anytime, in the Stripe billing portal reached from the parent’s emailed link. Cancel during the trial and you’re never charged. Cancel later and the plan stays active until the end of the period already paid for; we don’t give partial refunds for unused time, except where the law requires it.
If a payment fails or a subscription ends, the dashboard locks until it’s resolved. Your work is never held hostage: your data stays saved, and export and account deletion remain available from the locked screen.
Card details are handled entirely by Stripe on Stripe-hosted pages; Compass never sees them. If we change prices, we’ll give notice before the change affects an existing subscription.

What Compass is (and is not)

Compass is an independent planning tool. We are not affiliated with, or endorsed by, any school, college, the Common Application, or any testing agency. Admission-odds and fit scores are estimates computed from public data and the stats you enter; deadlines can change at the source. Nothing in Compass guarantees admission, scholarships, or financial aid, and nothing here is legal or financial advice. Always verify dates and requirements with each college before you rely on them.

AI assistance

AI features are advisory and can be wrong, incomplete, or outdated. Review anything before you rely on it, and everything before you submit it to a college.
The AI is designed and instructed to coach, not to write application materials for you. Don’t try to use Compass to generate work you’d submit as your own; your applications must be your own work, and you’re responsible for meeting the academic-integrity rules of your school and the colleges you apply to.
AI usage has monthly caps per account (currently 100 AI actions or an estimated $5 in processing cost), plus a site-wide budget. When a cap is reached, AI features pause until the next month. We may adjust these limits.

Your content

You keep ownership of what you create in Compass. You grant us the limited permission needed to host, store, and process it to run the service, including sending relevant portions to the service providers described in the Privacy Policy (for example, our database host, email provider, payment processor, and AI provider) and to the people you designate (your shared progress page and parent emails). This permission ends when you delete the content or your account, except for the minimal records described in the Privacy Policy.

Parent features and secret links

Only add a parent or guardian’s contact details with their knowledge, and never someone else’s. When you add them, Compass will email that address on your behalf (a confirmation request, then weekly summaries once confirmed, or the subscription checkout link). Parents can stop the weekly emails anytime with the unsubscribe link in each one.
The shared progress page is visible to anyone who has its link, and the parent checkout link lets its holder manage the subscription. You’re responsible for who those links are shared with. Turning sharing off kills the progress link immediately.

Acceptable use

Don’t: use the service unlawfully; submit another person’s information without authority; try to bypass security, usage limits, or access controls; probe, scrape, or reverse-engineer the service; impersonate anyone; misuse the sharing or email features to spam someone or expose someone else’s information; or upload malicious code.

Availability & changes

The service is provided on an “as is” basis and may change or have downtime. We’ll make reasonable efforts to keep it running. If we ever discontinue Compass, we’ll give notice and a window to export your data where practical.

Ending your use

You can delete your account at any time, even while the dashboard is payment-locked; deletion also cancels any active subscription. We may suspend accounts that materially violate these Terms. Accounts inactive for a long time (see the Privacy Policy’s retention section) become eligible for deletion, with an email warning before a cycle-ended account is removed.

Changes to these Terms

Each version is dated. If we make a material change, the app will ask you to review and accept the new version before continuing; if you don’t accept, you can export your data and delete your account.

Contact

Questions about these Terms: cem.kocao01@gmail.com.