NuGrade Terms of Service

Last updated: 2026-04-23.

Plain-English summary. NuGrade is a tool that gives you an LLM-generated grade opinion for a raw comic book based on photos and video you submit. Grades are advisory and are not a replacement for a professional grading certification. By signing up you agree to the rules in this document.

This document is a working draft authored by the NuGrade team and pending formal legal review before launch (Phase 5 task).

1. Acceptance and Eligibility

By creating an account, signing in with Apple, or otherwise using NuGrade ("the Service"), you agree to these Terms of Service and to our Privacy Policy.

You must be at least 16 years old to use NuGrade. If you are under the age of majority in your jurisdiction, you may only use the Service with the involvement of a parent or legal guardian.

If you do not agree to these terms, do not create an account and do not use the Service.

2. The Service

NuGrade is a software service that helps you generate an opinion-of-grade report for a raw (uncertified) comic book. You capture photos and a short video of the book using a mobile device; NuGrade's pipeline extracts video frames, retrieves reference cover scans and credits, and submits the package to an LLM-based grading agent that returns a structured Markdown report and a generated PDF. Reports are stored under your account and surfaced at a public, unindexed URL of the form https://nugrade.app/r/<short-id> so that you can share them with prospective buyers.

2a. Best-Effort Grade Disclaimer (please read)

Grades produced by NuGrade are advisory and best-effort. They are not guaranteed, are not insured, and are not a substitute for professional third-party grading.

• The grade you receive is an algorithmic opinion derived from your captures, the LLM agent's interpretation of those captures, and a published rubric.
• Photographic capture cannot fully reveal restoration, color touch, brittleness, trimming, married covers, or odor. NuGrade asks you about these via an intake survey and treats your answers as truth; if you misrepresent them, your grade will be wrong.
• NuGrade does not physically inspect the book. We will never agree to back a grade financially.
• A NuGrade report does not make a book "graded" in the trade sense. If you are selling a high-value book, you should still consider sending it to a professional 10-point-scale grading service.

You should treat a NuGrade report the way you would treat a friend who knows comics looking over your shoulder: a useful second opinion, no more.

3. Account Creation and Security

You may sign up with email and password, or via Sign in with Apple. You are responsible for keeping your credentials secure. Notify us immediately at support@nugrade.app if you suspect unauthorized access.

You may have only one active account per person. If we detect duplicate or abusive accounts we may merge them, terminate the duplicates, or refuse service.

4. Pricing, Credits, and Refunds

NuGrade is paid on a per-grade basis. Credits are purchased through:

• Apple In-App Purchase when buying inside the iOS app.
• Google Play Billing when buying inside the Android app.
• Stripe when buying through any web billing surface we expose.

Apple's and Google's standard refund processes apply to in-app purchases. If Apple or Google issues a refund for an unconsumed credit, we will revoke that credit. If a store issues a refund for a credit that was already consumed (i.e., a grade report has been generated), we will honor the refund and record an internal chargeback against the account; in that case the report associated with the consumed credit may be marked as disputed or flagged in the public report view.

Stripe refunds are handled at our discretion and follow the same "unconsumed-versus-consumed" logic. Contact support@nugrade.app for refund requests.

Promotional credits, trial credits, and free credits issued at our discretion are non-refundable and may be revoked if we detect abuse.

5. User Conduct

When using NuGrade you agree not to:

• Submit fraudulent captures (photos or video that misrepresent the physical book — for example, cropping in damage, swapping books mid-capture, or using AI-generated/photographed-from-a-screen images).
• Submit captures of books you do not own or are not authorized to grade.
• Misrepresent your intake survey answers about restoration, signatures, brittleness, odor, or other non-visible attributes.
• Use NuGrade to launder, conceal, or facilitate the sale of stolen books.
• Resell, sublicense, or repackage NuGrade reports as if they were issued by a professional third-party grading service.
• Scrape, enumerate, or programmatically harvest the public report surface (/r/:shortId) — short IDs are unguessable by design, and probing them in bulk is treated as abuse.
• Attempt to reverse-engineer the grading prompt, the agent's reasoning, or any anti-fraud signals.
• Use the Service to harass other users, our staff, or third-party graders whose reports are referenced.

We may remove reports, suspend accounts, or refuse service for any conduct we judge to be in breach of this section.

6. Intellectual Property

You retain ownership of the photos and video you upload. By submitting captures you grant NuGrade a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free license to store, transcode, render, and display them for the purposes of:

• generating your grade report;
• displaying the report to anyone you share its URL with;
• internal quality, fraud-prevention, and product-improvement work.

Cover scans, creator credits, and volume metadata fetched from third-party sources (e.g., ComicVine) remain the property of their respective rights-holders and are used under the applicable API terms.

The NuGrade name, logo, report layout, grading prompt, and renderer are owned by NuGrade and are not licensed to you.

7. Account Termination and Deletion

You may delete your account at any time from the in-app Account Settings screen. When you do:

• All of your reports are soft-deleted immediately. The public /r/:shortId URLs continue to resolve but display a "this report has been deleted" notice.
• For 30 days following deletion, your account is recoverable on request to support. After 30 days, the user record is tombstoned and your handle (if any) becomes available for reclaim.
• Capture media (photos/video bytes) are reaped from object storage 7 days after soft-delete.
• Financial ledger entries (purchase history, chargebacks) are retained for at least 7 years to satisfy tax and audit obligations. This is industry-standard for any service handling payments.
• Reports themselves are tombstoned indefinitely so that any later-arriving chargeback or dispute can still be reconciled — but their content is no longer publicly visible.

See the Privacy Policy for the full retention schedule.

We may terminate or suspend your account, with or without notice, if:

• you breach these Terms (especially Section 5);
• a payment is reversed via chargeback;
• we detect fraud, abuse, or illegal use;
• we are required to do so by law or by our payment processors.

8. Disclaimer of Warranties

The Service is provided "as is" and "as available" without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, or non-infringement.

We do not warrant that:

• the grade produced is correct, accurate, or close to what a professional grading service would assign;
• the Service will be uninterrupted, timely, secure, or error-free;
• any defect in the Service will be corrected.

9. Limitation of Liability

To the maximum extent permitted by law, NuGrade and its officers, employees, contractors, and affiliates shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, including loss of profits, loss of resale value, loss of data, or loss of reputation, arising out of or in connection with your use of the Service — even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages.

In no event shall our total cumulative liability to you for any claim arising out of these Terms or the Service exceed the greater of (a) the amount you paid NuGrade in the 12 months preceding the claim, or (b) USD $50.

This section survives termination of your account.

10. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify and hold harmless NuGrade from any claim, loss, or expense (including reasonable attorneys' fees) arising out of:

• your captures or content;
• your breach of these Terms;
• your sale or transfer of a comic book where a NuGrade report was used as part of the transaction.

11. Governing Law and Dispute Resolution

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Delaware, United States, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles.

Any dispute arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Service shall be resolved exclusively in the state or federal courts located in Delaware, and you consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.

If you reside in the European Union, the United Kingdom, or another jurisdiction whose mandatory consumer-protection laws override the foregoing, those laws apply to the extent required.

12. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes will be announced in-app and by email at least 14 days before they take effect. Your continued use of the Service after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms.

13. Contact

Questions about these Terms? Email support@nugrade.app.

For privacy-specific requests (data deletion, access, correction) see the Privacy Policy.