Terms of service

These terms are the agreement between you and BrightPath Learning, 19 rue de la Victoire, 38400 Saint-Martin-d'Hères, France, for your use of OptimalChinese (optimalchinese.com) and its mobile apps. By creating an account you accept them.

Who can use OptimalChinese

You must be at least 13 years old. If you are under 18, a parent or guardian must read and accept these terms on your behalf, and any subscription must be taken out and paid for by them — under French law someone under 18 cannot enter a contract like this alone.

Your account

One account is for one person. Keep your password to yourself; you are responsible for what happens under your account. Tell us at contact@optimalchinese.com if you think someone else has got into it.

What the service is

OptimalChinese teaches Chinese: it schedules what you review, and it generates exercises built from what you already know. We improve it continuously, which means features change, and occasionally one is removed. If we remove something you were relying on and you would rather not continue, tell us and we will refund you.

Subscription and free trial

Using OptimalChinese requires a subscription: $12.99 per month or $79.99 per year. Prices are shown with any tax that applies where you live already included.

A new subscription starts with a 7-day free trial. We take your payment details when you sign up but charge nothing until the trial ends. We email you before that happens, with a link to cancel. If you do not cancel, the subscription begins and renews automatically for the same period until you stop it.

How you are billed depends on where you subscribed

On the web — we bill you through Stripe. We are the seller. You cancel, change plan, and get invoices from your account page, and our 30-day guarantee below is ours to honour.

Inside the iOS or Android app — Apple or Google is the seller. They take the payment, and their terms govern it alongside these. You cancel in your device's subscription settings, not here, and cancelling anywhere else will not stop their billing. Refunds are theirs to decide: if they refuse one that our guarantee below would have covered, write to contact@optimalchinese.com and we will make it right ourselves.

Cancelling

You can cancel at any time, and it takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for — you keep your access until then. We do not pro-rate part-periods, except where the law says we must and except under the guarantee below. Your learning data stays where it is; if you come back, it is waiting.

30-day money-back guarantee

If it is not for you, ask within 30 days of a charge and we refund it in full. No reason needed and no argument. Write from the address on the account, through the contact page. The money goes back to whatever paid it, access ends when the refund is issued, and it applies to every charge separately — a renewal is covered exactly like a first payment.

Your right to withdraw, if you are in the EU

As a consumer in the EU you normally have 14 days to withdraw from something bought at a distance. Digital services are an exception when they start immediately: by starting your subscription you ask us to give you access straight away and accept that you lose the 14-day right once we do.

You are not worse off for it. The 7-day trial lets you evaluate the whole service without paying, and the 30-day guarantee above outlasts the right you are giving up by more than a fortnight.

If the price changes

We will email you at least 30 days before any price change affects you, and it only ever applies from your next renewal. If you do not want to pay the new price, cancel before then and you never will.

Using it fairly

Do not scrape the service, resell access, share one account among several people, work around the AI limits, or use it in a way that damages the service or other people using it. Do not use the AI tutor to produce anything illegal. We can suspend an account that does these things.

What you write, and what we do with it

Your notes, your imported cards, your classroom lists and your tutor conversations are yours. You give us only the permission we need to run the service for you: to store your content, sync it between your devices, show it to the teacher you invited into your own classroom, and send what you type to the AI so it can answer. Nothing else. We do not use your content to train any model.

What belongs to us, and what belongs to others

OptimalChinese — its name, its interface and its software — belongs to BrightPath Learning. Your subscription buys you the right to use it, not to copy it. Parts of the dictionary, the example sentences and the typefaces come from other people under open licences, credited on the attributions page, and their own licences govern those parts.

Availability

We aim to keep the service running but do not promise it never stops. It depends on providers we do not control, and it needs maintenance. Your learning data is also kept on your own device, so short outages do not stop you studying.

Ending the agreement

You can delete your account whenever you like, from your account page — it is immediate and permanent. We can suspend or close an account that breaks these terms, and we will tell you why. If we close your account without you having broken them, we refund whatever you have paid for time you did not get.

Our liability

The service is provided as it is. We are responsible for the harm we actually cause, up to what you paid us in the previous twelve months. We are not liable for indirect losses. Nothing here limits liability the law does not let us limit — including, if you are a consumer, your rights under the law where you live.

Reporting something illegal

If you believe content on OptimalChinese is illegal or infringes your rights, write to contact@optimalchinese.com with what it is, where it is and why. That address is also our single point of contact for authorities and for users under the EU Digital Services Act. We will look at every report and tell you what we did.

Complaints

Something wrong? Write to contact@optimalchinese.com first — most things are solved there. If we cannot agree, you can take the matter to the courts.

Changes to these terms

If we change them in a way that affects you, we will email you at least 30 days beforehand. Carrying on using the service after that means you accept the new version; if you would rather not, cancel and we refund the unused part.

Which law applies

These terms are governed by the law of France. If you are a consumer, this does not take away the protections you have under the law of the country you live in, and you can always bring a claim in your own country's courts. Contact: contact@optimalchinese.com.