Terms of service

Version 2026-09-20 · Effective 20 September 2026

These terms are an agreement between Syba LLC (“we”, “us”, “SchoolRota”) and the school, trust, district, or other organisation that subscribes to the SchoolRota service (“you”, the “Customer”). By creating an account, completing checkout, accepting these terms at signup, or using the service, you confirm that you have authority to bind your organisation and that you agree to these terms, our Acceptable Use Policy, and our Privacy Policy.

1. Definitions

Service: the SchoolRota web application, APIs, exports, emails, documentation, and related support.
Tenant: the isolated school portal provisioned for you, reachable at your chosen subdomain.
Customer Data: data you or your Authorised Users submit to the Service, including staff records, timetables, absences, rotas, and audit history.
Authorised User: a member of your staff or a contractor you permit to access your Tenant.
Order: the plan, seat limit, billing interval, and price selected at checkout or in a signed quotation.

2. The service

We provide cloud software for duty rota, lesson cover, and related school operations on a subscription basis. We grant you a non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable right to access and use the Service during your subscription term, for your own internal school operations, up to the seat limit in your Order.

We may change, add, or remove features. We will not make a change that materially reduces core functionality during a paid term without giving prior notice to account owners. The Service is provided as software as a service: you do not receive a copy of the software, and no source code, licence, or ownership interest is transferred to you.

Preview features

Features we label as beta, preview, pilot, or early access are provided for evaluation only. They may be incomplete or unstable, are excluded from any warranty or service commitment, and may be changed or withdrawn at any time without notice or liability. Do not rely on them for anything you cannot do another way.

3. Accounts, access, and security

You are responsible for all activity under your Tenant, including that of Authorised Users.
Keep credentials confidential, apply appropriate roles, use multi-factor authentication where offered, and notify us promptly at security@schoolrota.com if you suspect unauthorised access.
Accounts are for named individuals. Do not share logins between staff or use generic shared accounts.
Your subdomain is allocated for use with the Service and confers no trade mark or naming rights. We may reclaim a subdomain that infringes a third party's rights, impersonates another organisation, or is unused after termination.

4. Your responsibilities

Use the Service only for lawful school operations and in line with the Acceptable Use Policy.
Ensure you have a lawful basis, and where required have given the necessary notices, to upload staff and other personal data to the Service.
Maintain accurate staff data, working patterns, and access roles.
Keep your own independent record of statutory information. The Service is an operational planning tool, not a statutory record system, a safeguarding system, a pupil information system, or a payroll system.
Review anything published to staff. Rota suggestions, cover proposals, and AI drafts are aids to a decision, not the decision itself.

5. Trials, fees, and billing

Self-serve plans include a free trial of 30 days that starts after you confirm a school or trust email and create a password. No card is required to start the trial. The trial does not convert to a paid subscription automatically. You must choose a plan in the product and explicitly authorise a recurring card payment through our payment processor Stripe before any charge is taken. Fees are billed in advance, monthly or annually, and are exclusive of any applicable taxes, duties, or withholdings, which are your responsibility.

Renewal: once authorised, subscriptions renew automatically for successive terms until cancelled.
Cancellation: you may cancel at any time from the billing portal. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the current billing period.
No refunds: except where required by law, fees already paid are non-refundable and we do not pro-rate part-used periods, downgrades, or unused seats.
Unconverted trials: if a trial ends without an authorised subscription, the portal becomes read-only. You can still sign in, view authorised data, and export existing rotas. Editing and publishing pause until you subscribe or we close the account under these terms.
Price changes: we may change prices for a renewal term with at least 30 days' notice to account owners. Continued use after the change takes effect is acceptance of the new price.
Non-payment: if a payment fails we may suspend your Tenant after notice until the account is brought up to date.
Seat limits: the Service enforces the seat limit in your Order, so adding staff beyond it will be refused until you upgrade. Seats are counted as active staff records, not as named logins.

6. Intellectual property

Our rights

The Service, and all intellectual property rights in it, belong to us and our licensors. This includes the software, source code, database schema and structure, APIs, rules engines and scheduling logic, prompts, templates, seed content, documentation, designs, page layouts, illustrations, and the look and feel of the product. Nothing in these terms transfers any of those rights to you. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.

“SchoolRota”, the SchoolRota logo, and our other names and marks are our trade marks. You may not use them without our prior written consent, except to state factually that you use the Service. We may identify you as a customer using your name and logo in a customer list unless you tell us in writing that you would rather we did not.

Restrictions

Except to the extent that applicable law prohibits us from restricting you, you must not, and must not permit anyone else to:

copy, modify, translate, or create derivative works of the Service, or reverse engineer, decompile, or attempt to derive its source code, structure, or algorithms;
resell, sublicense, rent, lease, host, or otherwise make the Service available to any third party, or use it on behalf of an organisation that is not covered by your Order;
scrape, crawl, bulk-extract, or systematically copy the Service, its data model, or its content, or access it by automated means other than the APIs we provide;
use the Service, its output, or any part of it to train, fine-tune, or evaluate a machine learning model, or to build or assist in building a competing or substantially similar product or service;
run benchmarking, penetration testing, load testing, or competitive analysis without our prior written consent, or publish the results of any such activity;
remove, obscure, or alter any proprietary notice, watermark, or attribution in the Service or in exports and PDFs it produces.

Your data and content

You retain all rights in Customer Data. You grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, copy, transmit, display, and process Customer Data, and to create backups of it, only as needed to provide, secure, and support the Service, and as set out in our Data Processing Agreement. We do not sell Customer Data and we do not use Customer Data to train AI models. You are responsible for having the rights to any logo, image, or other material you upload for branding.

Aggregated insights

We may generate anonymised, aggregated statistics about how the Service is used (for example, feature adoption or performance metrics) and use them to operate and improve the Service and to report in aggregate. Such statistics will never identify you, your staff, or any individual, and will not contain Customer Data.

Feedback

If you send us suggestions, feature requests, or other feedback, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use it without restriction or obligation to you. We are free to implement similar functionality for all customers.

7. AI features

Some setup and import features can optionally use an AI model. Output is generated automatically, is presented as a draft requiring human review and approval, and may be incomplete or incorrect. You are responsible for checking anything you approve or publish. We do not warrant that AI output is accurate, complete, or fit for any particular purpose. Cover suggestions are produced by a deterministic rules engine, not by an AI model. Details of what is and is not sent to our AI sub-processor are in the Privacy Policy. AI features can be disabled for your Tenant on request.

8. Third-party services

The Service integrates with third-party systems you choose to connect, such as payment processing, identity providers, calendar providers, and management information systems. Those services are governed by their own terms, we do not control them, and we are not responsible for their availability, accuracy, or acts. A list of the providers we use to deliver the Service is on our sub-processors page.

9. Confidentiality

Each party will keep the other's non-public information confidential, use it only for the purposes of this agreement, protect it with at least reasonable care, and disclose it only to staff and advisers who need it and are under equivalent obligations. This does not apply to information that is public through no fault of the recipient, independently developed, or required to be disclosed by law or a regulator, in which case the recipient will give notice where it is lawful to do so.

10. Suspension and revocation of a tenant

We reserve the right to suspend, restrict, or revoke a Tenant, or any individual user's access, at our discretion. Where practical we will give notice first and a reasonable chance to fix the problem. We may act immediately and without prior notice where there is a risk to the Service, to other customers, to any individual, or to us. Grounds include:

non-payment of fees, or a failed or reversed payment that is not resolved after notice;
breach of these terms, the Acceptable Use Policy, or the Data Processing Agreement;
actual or suspected unlawful activity, fraud, chargeback abuse, misrepresentation at signup, or use of the Service to harass, endanger, or discriminate against any person;
activity that threatens the security, integrity, availability, or performance of the Service or another tenant's data;
infringement or misappropriation of our or a third party's intellectual property;
a requirement imposed by law, a court, a regulator, or applicable sanctions and export control rules, including where you or your organisation becomes a restricted party;
an unused account after prolonged dormancy, following notice. Ordinary trial expiry results in read-only access as described above.

While suspended, your portal is inaccessible except for billing administration by an owner. Revocation ends your right to use the Service and closes the Tenant. Where we revoke for your breach or non-payment, fees already paid are not refunded and any remaining committed fees for the current term become due. Where we revoke or discontinue the Service for our own convenience and you are not in breach, we will refund the unused portion of prepaid fees for the remainder of the current term.

We may also terminate a subscription for convenience at a renewal date by giving at least 30 days' notice.

11. Effect of termination

Your right to use the Service ends, other than an export window of 30 days from the effective date of termination. Where termination followed unlawful activity or a security risk we may require identity verification, or provide the export to a named senior officer of your organisation directly, rather than restoring general portal access.
Customer Data is deleted from live systems within 60 days of the end of that window, unless we are required by law to keep it. Residual copies in encrypted backups are overwritten as those backups age out of our rolling backup cycle.
Sections on intellectual property, confidentiality, fees already due, disclaimers, liability, indemnities, and governing law survive termination.
Data return and deletion are handled in line with the Data Processing Agreement.

12. Availability and support

We aim to keep the Service available during school hours and will schedule planned maintenance outside them where we reasonably can. Unless a separate written service level agreement applies to your Order, the Service is provided without a guaranteed uptime commitment or service credits. Support is provided by email during business days.

13. Warranties and disclaimers

We warrant that we will provide the Service with reasonable skill and care. Otherwise, and to the fullest extent permitted by law, the Service is provided “as is” and we exclude all other warranties, conditions, and representations, whether express or implied, including implied warranties of merchantability, satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted or error free, that it will meet your specific requirements, that any rota, cover suggestion, or AI draft will be correct or appropriate, or that it will ensure your compliance with any statutory, safeguarding, staffing, or inspection obligation. Those obligations remain yours.

14. Limitation of liability

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

Subject to that, neither party is liable for indirect, special, or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, business, anticipated savings, goodwill, or reputation, or for loss or corruption of data to the extent it could have been avoided by the other party's own backup or review practices, in each case however arising.

Subject to the above, each party's total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with this agreement, whether in contract, tort (including negligence), or otherwise, is limited to the total fees paid or payable by you for the Service in the 12 months immediately before the event giving rise to the claim. This cap does not apply to your obligation to pay fees, to your indemnity below, or to either party's breach of the other's intellectual property rights.

Except for unpaid fees, neither party may bring a claim under this agreement more than 12 months after it became aware, or ought reasonably to have become aware, of the facts giving rise to it.

15. Indemnity

You will indemnify us against claims, losses, and reasonable costs (including legal fees) arising from Customer Data or your use of the Service in breach of these terms or the Acceptable Use Policy, including claims that Customer Data infringes a third party's rights, that you lacked a lawful basis to process personal data you uploaded, or that arise from a decision you took using the Service.

We will defend you against a third-party claim that your permitted use of the Service infringes that party's intellectual property rights, provided you notify us promptly, let us control the defence, and co-operate. We may modify the Service or terminate the affected subscription with a pro-rata refund if we cannot resolve the claim on reasonable terms. This does not apply to claims arising from Customer Data, from use in breach of these terms, or from combination with anything we did not supply.

16. Force majeure

Neither party is liable for delay or failure to perform caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including internet or hosting provider failure, cyber attack, power failure, industrial action, epidemic, natural disaster, war, or government action. Payment obligations are not excused.

17. General

Assignment: you may not assign this agreement without our written consent. We may assign it to an affiliate or in connection with a merger, reorganisation, or sale of the business.
Sub-contracting: we may use sub-processors and sub-contractors to deliver the Service and remain responsible for their performance.
Notices: we give notice by email to the account owner or billing contact, or in the product. Keeping those addresses current and monitored is your responsibility, and notice sent to them is treated as received. You give notice to hello@schoolrota.com.
Electronic acceptance: accepting these terms at signup, or otherwise agreeing electronically, has the same effect as a signature. We record the version accepted, the time, and the accepting user, and that record is evidence of the agreement.
Changes to these terms: we may update these terms. We will give at least 30 days' notice of material changes to account owners and publish the new version here with a new version number. Continued use after the effective date is acceptance. If you do not accept a material change, you may cancel before it takes effect.
Entire agreement: these terms, the Acceptable Use Policy, the Privacy Policy, the Data Processing Agreement, and your Order form the whole agreement and replace any prior discussions. Your purchase order terms do not apply.
Severability and waiver: if any provision is unenforceable, the rest stands. A delay in enforcing a right is not a waiver of it.
No third-party rights: no one other than the parties may enforce this agreement.
Relationship: the parties are independent contractors. Nothing creates a partnership, agency, or employment relationship.
Compliance: each party will comply with applicable anti-bribery, sanctions, and export control laws. You confirm you are not a restricted party under those laws.

18. Governing law and disputes

This agreement and any dispute arising from it are governed by the laws of the United Arab Emirates, and the parties submit to the exclusive jurisdiction of the competent courts of the United Arab Emirates. Where a customer is a public body that cannot lawfully agree to that choice, the parties will agree in the Order a governing law and jurisdiction of the customer's own country. Before starting proceedings, the parties will try in good faith to resolve the dispute by escalation between senior representatives for 30 days. Nothing prevents either party from seeking urgent injunctive relief.

Data protection rights and remedies under applicable data protection law are unaffected by this clause, and nothing here removes your ability to complain to your local supervisory authority.

19. Contact

The Service is provided by Syba LLC, a company registered in the United Arab Emirates.

Syba LLC · hello@schoolrota.com
Security matters: security@schoolrota.com