Terms of service
These terms are the agreement between you and SMC Unlimited Services, which operates Literacy Trail (“we”), for use of the website and the app. By creating an account or using the service you accept them. If you are accepting on behalf of a school, center or other organization, you confirm you are authorized to bind it.
What the service is
Literacy Trail is a planning and record-keeping tool for literacy instruction. It stores lesson names, their order, and the records you create about the sessions you teach.
It is deliberately not several things. It contains no lesson content, no teaching materials, no assessments and no instruction. It does not diagnose, screen for or treat any condition, including dyslexia, and nothing in it is educational, clinical or medical advice. The professional judgment stays yours.
Who may use it
You must be at least 18 and able to enter a contract. Literacy Trail is for the adult who teaches: a parent, tutor, teacher, specialist, or the staff of a school or center. Students do not get accounts and must not be given yours.
Your account
Keep your sign-in details private and tell us promptly at hello@literacytrail.com if you believe someone else has access. You are responsible for what happens under your account.
Records about students
You decide what goes in. By entering a record about a student you confirm that you have the authority to do so, whether as the child's parent or under the arrangement you have with their family or your employer, and that you will follow any rules that apply to you.
Record only what you need. There is no field for a date of birth, address, contact detail, photograph, identifier, health record or assessment score, and you should not put those in a note. Where a first initial will do, use a first initial.
Your content and curricula
You keep ownership of everything you enter. You grant us only the permission needed to store it, display it back to you, back it up and provide the service.
When you build or import a curriculum, enter only names, numbers and short labels you have the right to use. Do not upload copyrighted lesson materials, manuals or passages. Third-party curriculum names are the property of their respective owners. Literacy Trail is an independent planning and progress-tracking tool and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the University of Florida Literacy Institute or any other publisher. It contains no UFLI lesson content, only lesson names and order.
Plans, trials and billing
Starting out
New accounts pick a plan during setup and start a 15-day free trial with a payment card on file. Accounts created before 9 October 2026 on the free plan keep it: one student, for the life of the account, with a short Literacy Trail line on printed reports and certificates. The free seat does not return when that student is archived or deleted. We will not take features away from an existing free account without telling you first.
The trial
Paid plans start with a 15-day free trial that requires a payment card. Nothing is charged during the trial. One trial per person; we keep a record of addresses and of payment cards that have used one so the offer is not taken repeatedly, and a trial started with a card that has already had one ends before it begins.
Student bands and the School plan
The Educator plan is sold in bands by number of students. Adding a student past your band moves the plan up to the next band at the price shown before you save, prorated and charged from that day. Reducing the roster does not change the current period; the plan moves down at the next renewal to the band the roster then needs. The School plan is priced per student per year with a stated minimum and is bought in steps of 25 students, by card or by invoice payable within 30 days. A plan paid by card starts at once; a plan paid by invoice starts when the invoice is paid. The same up-now, down-at-renewal rule applies to its student count.
Referrals
Someone who joins through your referral link gets a longer free trial when they start a paid plan with a payment card on file. A referral never gives access without a card. When their account makes its first payment, you receive a credit worth one month of your own plan (or of the Family monthly plan if you have none yet), applied to your next bill. You can earn credit for up to 6 paid referrals over the life of your account. Credits carry no cash value. We may withdraw a credit or a longer trial obtained by creating accounts for the purpose of earning it, including where the same payment card is used on both accounts.
Renewal
At the end of the trial the card is charged for the billing period you chose, weekly, monthly or yearly, and the subscription renews automatically at the then-current price until you cancel. Prices are in US dollars and exclude any tax that applies where you are.
Canceling
Cancel at any time from Plan and billing. Cancel during the trial and nothing is charged. Cancel afterwards and access continues to the end of the period you have already paid for.
Charged by mistake, or forgot to cancel? Write to hello@literacytrail.com within 14 days of the charge and we will refund it. Part-used periods after that are not refunded, except where the law requires it; cancel early instead.
What happens after
Your records are not deleted when a subscription ends. They stay readable and exportable. Recording new sessions needs an active plan.
Price changes and school plans
We may change prices with at least 30 days' notice by email before a change affects your renewal. School plan agreements are quoted and invoiced separately on their own terms, which take precedence over this section where they differ.
Acceptable use
Do not:
- Try to reach data that is not yours, or probe, scan or disrupt the service.
- Share an account between people who should have their own, or resell access.
- Upload material you do not have the right to, or anything unlawful.
- Use automated means to extract data at scale, or attempt to rebuild the service from it.
- Enter a student's sensitive personal information, as described above.
Suspension and termination
You can delete your account at any time from Settings, which removes the records you own and cancels any subscription. We may suspend or end an account that breaks these terms or puts other users at risk. Unless the breach makes it impossible, we will tell you first and give you a chance to export your records.
Availability
We work to keep the service running and take backups, but we do not promise it will be uninterrupted or error free, and we may change or retire features. If we ever discontinue the service we will give reasonable notice and time to export. Export your records regularly if they matter to you.
Disclaimers and liability
The service is provided as is, without warranties of any kind to the extent the law allows. We are not liable for indirect, incidental or consequential losses, or for lost profits, lost data or lost goodwill. Where liability cannot be excluded, it is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.
Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, you keep the rights your local law gives you.
Privacy
How we handle information is set out in the privacy policy, which forms part of these terms.
Schools and student data
When a school, district or tutoring organization uses Literacy Trail, the records its staff enter about students belong to the organization and we handle them only on its instructions, as its service provider. In United States terms we act as a “school official” with a legitimate educational interest under FERPA, under the organization's direct control, and for no other purpose. In practice that means:
- We use student records only to provide the service to the organization. They are never sold, never used for advertising, never used to profile a child, and never used to train machine learning models.
- Students do not get accounts and are never contacted by us. Everything about a student is entered by the adult teaching them.
- Our processors (the database, hosting, payments and error monitoring, listed in the privacy policy) are bound by written terms at least as protective as these, and we stay responsible for them.
- The organization can export every record it owns at any time, on any plan, as CSV or JSON.
- Within 30 days of a written request, or of the account closing, we delete the organization's student records from the live database; encrypted backups age out on their own shortly after.
- If we learn of unauthorized access to student records, we tell the organization without undue delay, with what we know and what we are doing about it, so it can meet its own notice duties.
- We will help the organization answer a parent's request to see or correct their child's record, and we refer any request that reaches us directly back to the organization.
A school that needs a signed data processing agreement or a state-specific student privacy addendum can write to hello@literacytrail.com and we will sign one on these terms.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the law of the State of Illinois, United States, without regard to its conflict of law rules. Any dispute that cannot be settled by writing to us is brought in the state and federal courts located in Lake County, Illinois, and both sides accept that venue. If you are a consumer, nothing in this section takes away protections or venue rights the law of your home country or state gives you.
Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. The date at the top changes, and material changes are announced in the app or by email before they take effect. Continuing to use the service after that means you accept the new version.
Contact
SMC Unlimited Services, 555 N Sheridan Rd, Lake Forest, IL 60045, United States