1. Acceptance of these terms
By accessing, browsing, creating an account for, or using CodeStart Academy, you agree to these Terms of Use and to any policies referenced in them, including the Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, you must not use the website.
These Terms form a binding agreement between you and the UK-based operator of CodeStart Academy. The website is operated from the United Kingdom but may be accessed internationally. If you use the website on behalf of an organisation, school, company, or other entity, you represent that you have authority to bind that entity to these Terms.
2. Description of the service
CodeStart Academy provides educational materials related to web development, including lessons about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, accessibility, workflow, Git, deployment, performance, forms, and capstone project development. The website may include lesson pages, examples, practice tasks, five-question lesson checkpoints, private lesson bookmarks, a CodeStart Community forum, private community reports, private support requests, CodeStart Arcade game pages, an HTML sandbox project library, account registration, login, account dashboard features, account settings, collapsible lesson notes, Firestore-backed storage, and optional donation links processed by Stripe.
The service is provided for educational and informational purposes. Completion of lessons does not guarantee employment, certification, professional qualification, academic credit, income, business success, technical mastery, or any particular result.
2a. International access
CodeStart Academy is operated from the United Kingdom and is available worldwide. We do not represent that the website, lesson content, community forum, account features, saved notes, saved sandbox code, Arcade pages, arcade games, saved arcade scores, donation options, or related services are appropriate, available, lawful, or compliant in every country or territory. You are responsible for complying with any local laws that apply to your access or use.
We may restrict, suspend, or limit access from certain locations where required by law, security risk, technical limitations, sanctions compliance, provider restrictions, or operational reasons.
3. Eligibility
You may use the website only if you can legally agree to these Terms. The website is available globally, but you are responsible for making sure your use is lawful in your country or territory. If you are under the age of majority in your jurisdiction, you may use the website only with permission and supervision from a parent, guardian, teacher, or other authorised adult. You must not use the website if applicable law prohibits you from doing so.
4. Account registration and security
Some features require an account. You may create or access an account using email and password authentication or supported third-party sign-in methods such as Google sign-in. You agree to provide accurate information when creating or using an account and to keep your login credentials secure. You are responsible for activity that occurs under your account unless the activity results from our failure to use reasonable security measures.
You must not share your password, misuse Google sign-in, use another person’s account without permission, attempt to bypass authentication, access data belonging to another user, or interfere with Firebase Authentication, Firestore Database, hosting infrastructure, or any website security control.
We may suspend, restrict, or terminate access to accounts if we reasonably believe there has been unauthorised use, security risk, violation of these Terms, unlawful conduct, abuse, or technical harm to the website.
4a. Account deletion
Signed-in users may delete their CodeStart Academy account from the Account Settings page. You may also request deletion through the Contact page if you cannot access your account. You may be asked to verify account ownership before deletion is completed.
Account deletion may remove access to your account dashboard, saved lesson notes, checkpoint results, lesson bookmarks, saved sandbox projects, learning progress, private arcade scores, public arcade leaderboard entries, support request access, and account-based features. Public community posts or replies may remain visible unless removed, anonymised, or deleted through moderation or a verified support request. Community reports, support requests, and limited records may be retained where required or permitted for legal compliance, security, fraud prevention, abuse investigation, dispute resolution, backup integrity, or legitimate operational purposes.
5. Learning data, sandbox projects, community content, arcade scores, and user-generated content
The notes feature allows signed-in users to save and delete lesson-specific notes. Lesson checkpoints may save latest and best results, while bookmarks allow signed-in users to save lesson links privately. The HTML sandbox allows signed-in users to create, open, rename, duplicate, and delete private practice projects, including lesson-specific guided starter projects. CodeStart Community allows signed-in users to publish public posts and replies. CodeStart Arcade may allow signed-in users to save private score summaries and publish a display name with their best result on a public leaderboard. You retain responsibility for the content you write, store, submit, publish, run, or otherwise make available through the website. You should not store or publish sensitive personal information, passwords, access tokens, private keys, payment information, confidential business information, infringing content, unlawful material, or content that you do not have the right to use.
Lesson notes are saved separately for each lesson and can be deleted individually by the signed-in user who saved them. Community posts and replies are public and may be read by other visitors. Do not publish anything in the Community forum that you want to keep private. Signed-in users may delete their own community posts and their own community replies. Deleting a post also removes replies stored under that post, including replies written by other users.
Signed-in users may privately report another user's public post or reply for review. Reports may be dismissed or may lead to reported content being edited, hidden, or removed. Official replies, edits, and removals may be labelled in the interface where relevant.
You grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, process, transmit, display, moderate, and technically operate your notes, learning records, bookmarks, sandbox projects, community posts, community replies, community reports, support requests, and arcade score data for the purpose of providing the website and related functionality. This licence does not give us ownership of your notes, sandbox code, community content, or support request content.
We may remove, restrict, or disable content if required by law, if it violates these Terms, if it creates security risk, or if it may expose the website or others to harm.
6. Donations and Stripe payments
CodeStart Academy may accept optional donations to help cover hosting, maintenance, tools, and future lesson improvements. Donations are voluntary and are not required to access the free educational content currently available on the website.
Donation checkout is handled by Stripe. By making a donation through Stripe, you may also be subject to Stripe's terms, privacy notices, payment method rules, fraud-prevention checks, and receipt processes. CodeStart Academy does not store full card details.
Unless this website expressly states otherwise, donations are not charitable donations, are not tax-deductible charitable contributions, and do not create membership rights, ownership rights, service-level guarantees, certification, priority support, or entitlement to future features.
If you believe a donation was made in error, use the Contact page as soon as possible. Refunds may be reviewed case by case, subject to payment processor rules, fraud checks, accounting requirements, and applicable law.
7. CodeStart Arcade gameplay and scores
CodeStart Arcade games are provided for entertainment. Arcade gameplay may include stylised hazards, guards, traps, escape objectives, scoring, timers, and other fictional game elements. These elements are not realistic violence, gambling, financial rewards, competitions, or professional advice.
Signed-in users may save private arcade score summaries to their account. When a qualifying result saves, the relevant public leaderboard may display the player's display name and best score or fastest full-run time. Leaderboards do not display email addresses. Scores and rankings are provided for personal progress, replay value, and friendly competition only. They do not provide prizes, financial rewards, professional ranking, or guaranteed eligibility for any competition. We do not guarantee score permanence, ranking accuracy, leaderboard availability, or that scores will be recoverable if account data is deleted or unavailable.
8. User conduct and prohibited uses
You agree not to misuse the website. Prohibited conduct includes, without limitation:
- Using the website for unlawful, deceptive, abusive, harmful, or fraudulent activity.
- Attempting to gain unauthorised access to accounts, databases, systems, code, infrastructure, or user data.
- Probing, scanning, testing, or bypassing security or authentication controls except with express written permission.
- Uploading, storing, or transmitting malware, malicious code, harmful scripts, exploit payloads, or destructive content.
- Using the sandbox to create, test, store, or run code intended to attack, disrupt, scrape, phish, impersonate, or compromise any person, device, account, website, or service.
- Using the Community forum to harass, threaten, abuse, spam, impersonate others, publish private information, or share unlawful, infringing, misleading, or harmful content.
- Impersonating CodeStart Academy, falsely claiming official status, or attempting to access restricted website controls.
- Manipulating arcade scores, automating gameplay, exploiting bugs, or interfering with arcade game logic, account score storage, or other users' access to the arcade.
- Interfering with website availability, performance, hosting, Firebase services, analytics, or account systems.
- Copying, scraping, harvesting, or extracting website content or user data at scale without permission.
- Impersonating another person or misrepresenting your identity, affiliation, or authorisation.
- Using the educational content to create a confusingly similar competing service by copying the platform as a whole.
- Violating intellectual property, privacy, publicity, confidentiality, or other rights of any person or organisation.
9. Educational content and no professional advice
The lessons, examples, explanations, code snippets, sandbox, practice tasks, and checklists are provided for educational purposes. Although we aim to provide accurate and useful material, the website may contain mistakes, omissions, outdated examples, incomplete explanations, or code that is unsuitable for a particular production environment.
The website does not provide legal, financial, security, engineering, employment, tax, or professional advice. You are responsible for reviewing, testing, validating, securing, and adapting any code or concept before using it in a real project.
10. Intellectual property
The website design, logo, branding, lesson structure, text, examples, graphics, user interface, layout, code organisation, and other materials are owned by or licenced to CodeStart Academy unless otherwise stated. These materials are protected by copyright, trademark, trade dress, database, and other intellectual property laws.
You may use the educational content for personal learning and practise. Unless expressly permitted, you may not reproduce, distribute, sell, sublicence, publicly display, publish, copy, modify, create derivative works from, or commercially exploit substantial parts of the website or its content.
Any feedback, suggestions, corrections, or ideas you provide may be used to improve the website without obligation to compensate you, provided we do not claim ownership of your unrelated pre-existing intellectual property.
11. Third-party services and dependencies
The website may rely on third-party services, libraries, hosting providers, content delivery networks, analytics tools, Firebase Authentication, Firestore Database, Stripe payment services, Google-hosted scripts, browser APIs, or other external infrastructure. Your use of those features may be subject to third-party terms, privacy policies, availability limits, security practices, and technical requirements.
We are not responsible for outages, policy changes, pricing changes, deprecations, data handling practises, or failures caused by third-party providers outside our reasonable control.
12. Availability, changes, and discontinuation
We may modify, update, suspend, restrict, replace, or discontinue any part of the website at any time. This may include lesson content, checkpoints, bookmarks, account features, notes functionality, Community forum availability, community reporting, support request features, Arcade page availability, arcade games, arcade score saving, sandbox projects, donation options, authentication methods, page structure, design, hosting configuration, metadata, or third-party integrations.
We do not guarantee uninterrupted availability, error-free operation, compatibility with every browser or device, permanent storage of notes, learning results, bookmarks, sandbox projects, community content, or arcade scores, or continued access to any specific feature.
13. Privacy
Our Privacy Policy explains how information may be collected, used, stored, and disclosed. Because the website is operated from the United Kingdom and available globally, privacy obligations may include UK data protection law and, depending on user location and service activity, other international privacy requirements. By using the website, you acknowledge the Privacy Policy. If you use account features, saved notes, saved sandbox code, community posts, community replies, support requests, saved arcade scores, or donation features, you understand that Firebase Authentication, Firestore Database, Stripe, and related providers may process information needed to provide those features.
14. Disclaimers
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the website and all content are provided on an “as is” and “as available” basis without warranties of any kind, whether express, implied, statutory, or otherwise. We disclaim warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy, reliability, availability, security, and uninterrupted operation.
We do not warrant that the website will meet your requirements, that code examples, checkpoint results, sandbox output, community content, arcade gameplay, score calculation, or saved arcade score data will be free from errors, that saved notes, bookmarks, sandbox projects, community posts, replies, or arcade scores will never be lost, that authentication will always function, or that the website will be secure from every possible vulnerability or attack.
15. Limitation of liability
To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, CodeStart Academy and its operator will not be liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary, punitive, or enhanced damages, including loss of profits, loss of data, loss of goodwill, business interruption, computer damage, educational interruption, or inability to access the website.
Where liability cannot be excluded, our total liability for any claim relating to the website will be limited to the amount you paid to use the website in the twelve months before the claim arose, or, if you paid nothing, to the lowest amount permitted by applicable law.
16. Indemnity
You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless CodeStart Academy and its operator from claims, damages, liabilities, losses, costs, and expenses, including reasonable legal fees, arising from your misuse of the website, violation of these Terms, violation of law, infringement of rights, user-generated content, arcade feature misuse, payment misuse, chargeback abuse, or unauthorised access caused by your conduct.
17. Termination
We may suspend or terminate your access to the website or account features if you violate these Terms, create risk, misuse the service, or if continued access would expose us, other users, or third-party providers to legal, security, technical, or operational harm. You may stop using the website at any time.
Sections that by their nature should survive termination will survive, including intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnity, privacy-related provisions, dispute provisions, and any payment or ownership provisions if later applicable.
18. Governing law, jurisdiction, and global users
These Terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, unless mandatory consumer protection laws in your country or territory require otherwise. If you are a consumer, you may also have mandatory rights under the laws of the country where you live, and nothing in these Terms is intended to limit those rights where they cannot lawfully be limited.
Subject to any mandatory local rights that apply to you, the courts of England and Wales will have jurisdiction over disputes relating to these Terms or the website. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may also be able to bring proceedings in your local courts where applicable consumer law allows this.
Before starting formal proceedings, you agree to contact us in good faith so the issue can be reviewed and potentially resolved informally.
19. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms from time to time. Changes may reflect new features, legal requirements, business changes, security practices, or technical updates. The updated version will be posted on this page with a revised effective date. Continued use of the website after changes means you accept the updated Terms.
20. Contact
For questions about these Terms, account issues, account deletion requests, privacy requests, or support enquiries, use the Contact page.