Terms of Use — GroupMark

1. Agreement to these terms

By downloading or using GroupMark, you agree to these terms. If you're using GroupMark as part of your employment (for example, as a teacher at a school), you're agreeing on behalf of yourself, not your employer — GroupMark is licensed to individual users, not institutions.

If you don't agree with these terms, please don't use GroupMark.

2. Your licence to use GroupMark

When you download GroupMark, we grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use the software on devices you own or control.

This licence is for your own professional use. You may not:

Share your subscription or account with others, or use it on more devices than permitted
Resell, sublicence, or redistribute GroupMark
Reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to extract the source code
Use GroupMark to build a competing product

Your licence remains active for as long as your subscription is current. If your subscription lapses, you'll still be able to view your existing data, but you won't be able to create new tasks or classes until you resubscribe.

3. Free trial

GroupMark includes a 30-day free trial with full access to every feature — unlimited tasks, classes, and students. No credit card is required to get started.

When the trial ends, you'll need a subscription to continue creating new tasks or classes. Any data you created during the trial remains accessible.

The trial is designed to give you a genuine feel for the full GroupMark workflow — not a crippled demo. If you find it isn't right for you, you haven't spent anything.

4. Subscriptions and billing

GroupMark subscriptions are available monthly ($11.00 AUD/month) or annually ($100.00 AUD/year). All prices include Australian GST.

Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period. You can cancel at any time from within the app or through your app store account — cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period, so you won't be charged again but you'll retain access until it ends.

Payments are processed securely by the Microsoft Store. We don't store your payment details.

5. Refunds

If GroupMark isn't working as described, or you have a reasonable concern about your purchase, we're happy to discuss a refund.

Monthly subscriptions: contact us within 14 days of a charge for a full refund of that month.
Annual subscriptions: contact us within 30 days of purchase or renewal for a pro-rata refund of the unused portion.

To request a refund, email us at [email protected]. We'll respond within 2 business days.

Nothing in this section limits your rights under Australian Consumer Law — see section 11.

6. Your data and privacy

GroupMark is designed to keep your data on your device. Here's what that means in practice:

Student data — task responses, scores, and class lists are stored locally in a database on your machine. None of this is transmitted to us or any third party.
Student names — if you use the automatic name recognition feature, names are read from scanned papers using on-device machine learning (Windows ML). This processing happens entirely on your device.
Student email addresses — if you use the email results feature, student email addresses are stored locally as part of your class records. They are transmitted only to your SMTP server when you send results — not to us.
Subscription validation — GroupMark periodically checks your subscription status with the Microsoft Store. This is the only routine network call GroupMark makes that isn't initiated by you, and it contains no student data.

We don't run analytics, telemetry, or crash reporting that could transmit data from your machine. We don't sell data. We don't have data to sell.

6a. Email sending and SMTP credentials

GroupMark can send student results directly via email using an SMTP server you configure. To use this feature, you provide your SMTP server address, port, username, and password. GroupMark uses these credentials to connect to your mail server and send results — it does not route email through our servers, and we never have access to your credentials.

How credentials are stored: Your SMTP username and password are stored in your operating system's secure credential store (Windows Credential Manager). They are never written to disk in plain text. GroupMark retrieves them only when sending email, and they are not accessible to other applications.

We recommend using an app-specific password rather than your main email account password. Gmail, Outlook, and most other providers support app-specific passwords — they give GroupMark access to send email without exposing your primary account credentials, and can be revoked independently if needed.

GroupMark does not log sent emails or retain any record of what was sent or to whom, beyond the student and submission records already stored in your local database.

7. AI-assisted features

GroupMark includes optional AI features that can suggest question regions, marking criteria, and topic tags for your tasks. These features are opt-in — they won't activate unless you enable them in Settings.

When you use these features, your blank task template (the questions, without any student responses or identifying information) is sent to Anthropic's Claude API to generate suggestions. You review, adjust, and approve the results before they're used for marking.

No student work is ever sent externally. AI features operate only on the blank template you've created.

AI-generated suggestions are a starting point, not a marking decision. All marking remains under your control.

8. Acceptable use

GroupMark is intended for use by teachers and educators for legitimate assessment purposes. You agree not to use it in ways that would harm students or violate their rights — for example, sharing student results with unauthorised parties, or using exported data in ways that breach your school's privacy obligations.

We reserve the right to revoke a licence if we have reasonable grounds to believe it's being used in a way that causes harm or violates these terms.

9. Intellectual property

GroupMark and everything in it — the code, design, and branding — belongs to us. These terms don't transfer any ownership to you; they give you a licence to use the software.

Your data is yours. The tasks you create, the classes you set up, and the results you generate belong to you. We make no claim over any of it.

10. Warranties and liability

GroupMark is provided in good faith and we work hard to keep it reliable — but we can't guarantee it will be error-free or available at all times. To the extent permitted by law, we provide it "as is" without warranties beyond those required by Australian Consumer Law.

We're not liable for indirect losses arising from your use of GroupMark — for example, if a software bug causes marking data to be lost. We strongly recommend keeping backups of your GroupMark data folder.

Our total liability to you in any circumstance is capped at the amount you've paid for GroupMark in the 12 months preceding the issue.

11. Australian Consumer Law

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits rights you have under the Australian Consumer Law. If GroupMark fails to meet a consumer guarantee under the ACL — for example, if it's not fit for the purpose described — you're entitled to a remedy. These terms don't change that.

12. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms from time to time. If we make significant changes, we'll notify active subscribers by email before the changes take effect. Continuing to use GroupMark after that point means you've accepted the updated terms.

The "last updated" date at the top of this page always reflects the current version.

13. Contact

Questions about these terms, or anything else? Email us at [email protected]. We're a small team and we read everything.

These terms are governed by the laws of South Australia, Australia.