Terms of Service

Pitulo is an academic project supervision platform for tertiary institutions in Ghana. Students submit thesis chapters and other project work; supervisors review, annotate and return feedback on that work; and departmental coordinators oversee the progress of projects within the department and campus they are responsible for.

The Services are intended for use in connection with a recognised tertiary institution. They are not a general-purpose writing tool, a document store, or a substitute for your institution’s own systems of record.

The Services are not tailored to comply with sector-specific regulation outside Ghanaian higher education. If your use of the Services would subject us to regulatory obligations we have not undertaken, you may not use them.

Access from outside Ghana is at your own initiative. You are responsible for compliance with any local law that applies to you.

You must be at least 18 years of age, or the age of majority in your jurisdiction, to register for an account. If you are under 18 you may use the Services only with the consent and supervision of a parent or guardian who agrees to these Legal Terms on your behalf.

A student account may be registered with any email address you control. A supervisor account may be registered only with an email address issued by a university we support. This is not a formality: your institution is determined from the domain of the address you verify, and every subsequent permission — the faculty and department you belong to, the projects you may see, the students you may supervise — follows from it.

Departmental oversight is not available at registration. It is requested from an existing supervisor account and granted by us or by a head of department, and it may be revoked.

You agree to provide true, accurate and complete information when registering and to keep it current. You may not register on behalf of anyone else, register more than one account for yourself, or use an account you are not entitled to.

You are responsible for keeping your password confidential and for all activity that occurs under your account. You agree to notify us immediately at support@pitulo.io if you believe your account has been accessed without your authorisation.

We may remove, reclaim or change a username or display name we determine, in our sole discretion, to be inappropriate, misleading, or infringing.

This section is the one most likely to matter to you, and we have placed it early for that reason.

The Services help you plan, write, revise and submit academic work, and include features that generate suggestions, corrections and feedback using artificial intelligence. Those features are aids to your own work. They do not write your thesis, and using them does not make the resulting work any less yours to account for.

YOUR INSTITUTION’S RULES ON ACADEMIC HONESTY GOVERN YOUR WORK, NOT OURS. Nothing in these Legal Terms, and no output of the Services, overrides, relaxes or substitutes for those rules. Some institutions restrict the use of AI assistance in assessed work, some require it to be declared, and some prohibit it outright. It is your responsibility to know your institution’s position and to comply with it.

We do not warrant that work produced with the assistance of the Services will be accepted by your institution, will pass any similarity or AI-detection check, or will satisfy any academic standard. Suggestions generated by the Services may be inaccurate, incomplete, or unsuitable, and must be reviewed by you before use.

Submitting work through the Services is not submission to your institution. Where your institution requires submission through its own systems, you remain responsible for doing so and for meeting its deadlines.

We are the owner or licensee of all intellectual property rights in the Services, including the source code, databases, functionality, software, designs, text and graphics contained in them (the “Content”), and the trademarks, service marks and logos contained in them (the “Marks”).

The Content and Marks are protected by copyright, trademark and other laws of Ghana and other jurisdictions, and are provided to you “AS IS” for your personal, non-commercial use in connection with your studies or your employment at a supported institution.

Except as expressly permitted in these Legal Terms, no part of the Services and no Content or Marks may be copied, reproduced, republished, uploaded, posted, publicly displayed, encoded, translated, transmitted, distributed, sold, licensed or otherwise exploited for any commercial purpose without our prior written permission.

You retain all ownership of and rights in the thesis chapters, drafts, data, writing, comments, recordings and other materials you upload or create through the Services (“Your Work”). Uploading Your Work does not transfer any ownership to us.

You grant us a limited, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, transmit, display and reformat Your Work, and to process it through third-party providers, solely to the extent necessary to operate the Services and to deliver the features you have chosen to use. This licence ends when Your Work is deleted, except for copies retained in routine backups for a limited period and any copies we are required by law to retain.

WE DO NOT USE YOUR WORK TO TRAIN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE MODELS, AND WE DO NOT SELL IT. Where a feature you use sends text to a third-party AI provider in order to produce feedback, a correction, or a similarity comparison for you, it is sent to answer your request and for no other purpose.

You represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all rights in Your Work, that it does not infringe the rights of any third party, and that it does not breach any obligation of confidentiality you owe to any person or institution.

The Services are collaborative, and different people see different things. This section describes who sees what. It is a description of how the Services are built, and we do not vary it by agreement.

Your assigned supervisor can see the work you submit to them, the annotations and feedback attached to it, and the progress of your project. A departmental coordinator can see the projects, supervisors and progress within the department and campus for which they hold an active oversight scope, and can see historical records for the period during which that scope was active.

PEER DISCUSSION WITHIN A PROJECT GROUP IS PRIVATE TO THAT GROUP. Comments, replies, reactions and voice notes exchanged between the student members of a group are not visible to the assigned supervisor, to a coordinator, or to any other account. This is enforced in the design of the Services and is not a setting that can be changed by us, by your supervisor, or by your institution.

A student removed from a project group loses access to that group’s discussion. Records of academic work already submitted are retained.

We may access your account and Your Work where necessary to operate, secure or support the Services, to investigate a suspected breach of these Legal Terms, or where we are required to do so by law.

Access to a project workspace requires a one-time payment for the academic season to which it relates. Prices are displayed in Ghana Cedis (GHS) before you pay and are inclusive of applicable taxes unless stated otherwise. We reserve the right to correct any pricing error, including after an order has been submitted.

Payments are processed by Paystack. We do not receive, handle or store your card number, mobile money PIN, or other payment credentials. Your use of Paystack is subject to Paystack’s own terms.

You agree to provide current and complete purchase information and to promptly update it. You agree to pay all charges at the prices then in effect for your purchase, and you authorise us to charge your chosen payment provider for those amounts.

A workspace grants immediate access to the Services for an academic season. Payments are therefore not refundable except where required by law, or where a fault on our side prevents you from using what you paid for and we are unable to remedy it within a reasonable period.

To request a refund on that basis, contact support@pitulo.io with your account email and a description of the problem.

You may not access or use the Services for any purpose other than that for which we make them available. In particular, and without limitation, you agree not to:

The Services allow you to create and share comments, feedback, annotations, voice notes and other material with other users (“Contributions”). Contributions may be visible to the people described in Section 5.

By making a Contribution, you grant us the licence described in Section 4 for the purpose of operating the Services, and you represent that the Contribution is not false, misleading, harassing, defamatory, unlawful, or infringing of any third party’s rights.

We are not obliged to monitor Contributions, but we may remove or edit any Contribution at any time, without notice, if we determine in our sole discretion that it breaches these Legal Terms or is otherwise objectionable.

Feedback and suggestions you send us about the Services are not confidential, and we may use them without restriction or compensation.

Certain features of the Services use third-party artificial intelligence providers to analyse text, generate suggestions, summarise feedback, or compare drafts. Where such a feature is used, the relevant text is transmitted to that provider for processing.

Output produced by these features is generated automatically and may be inaccurate, incomplete, outdated, or inappropriate for your purpose. It is not academic advice, and it is not a substitute for the judgement of your supervisor. You must review any output before relying on it or submitting it.

We may change, suspend or withdraw an AI feature at any time. We do not warrant that any such feature will remain available, or that its output will be consistent between uses.

See Sections 3 and 12 for how these features interact with your institution’s rules and with your personal data.

The Services rely on third-party providers for hosting, payment processing, email delivery, SMS delivery, authentication and artificial intelligence processing. Those providers act on our instructions and only to deliver the Services.

The Services may also contain links to third-party websites or content that we do not control. We are not responsible for their content, accuracy, or practices, and inclusion of a link does not imply endorsement. Your dealings with a third party are solely between you and that third party.

We reserve the right, but not the obligation, to monitor the Services for breaches of these Legal Terms; to take appropriate action against anyone who breaches them, including reporting the person to law enforcement or to their institution; to refuse, restrict, or disable access to any material; and to otherwise manage the Services in a manner designed to protect our rights and property and to facilitate the proper functioning of the Services.

We process personal data in accordance with Ghana’s Data Protection Act, 2012 (Act 843).

We collect what the Services require: your name, email address, phone number where you verify one, your institution, faculty, department, campus and programme, your role, and the work and Contributions you create. We process this data to operate the Services, to establish which institution and department you belong to, to verify that you control the email address and phone number you provide, to take payment, and to provide support.

We do not sell personal data. We share it with the categories of provider described in Section 10, and with your institution to the extent necessary for supervision and departmental oversight to function.

You may request access to the personal data we hold about you, request its correction, or request deletion of your account. Some records must be retained for as long as the law requires, including records relating to payment. Requests may be sent to support@pitulo.io.

By registering, you consent to receive electronic communications from us relating to your account and to the operation of the Services. You may withdraw consent to non-essential communications at any time; communications necessary to operate your account are not optional while the account exists.

These Legal Terms remain in effect while you use the Services.

WE MAY, IN OUR SOLE DISCRETION AND WITHOUT NOTICE OR LIABILITY, DENY ACCESS TO THE SERVICES TO ANY PERSON FOR ANY REASON, INCLUDING FOR BREACH OF ANY REPRESENTATION, WARRANTY OR COVENANT IN THESE LEGAL TERMS OR OF ANY APPLICABLE LAW. We may terminate your account, delete Contributions, and prohibit further use. Where we take such action we will tell you the reason, unless we are prevented from doing so by law or doing so would prejudice an investigation.

You may stop using the Services and request deletion of your account at any time by contacting support@pitulo.io.

If your account is terminated, you may not register a new account under your own name, a false name, or the name of any third party.

We reserve the right to change, modify or remove the contents of the Services at any time and for any reason, and to modify or discontinue all or part of the Services without notice. We are not liable to you or any third party for any modification, price change, suspension or discontinuance.

We do not warrant that the Services will be available at all times. We may experience hardware, software or other problems, or need to perform maintenance, resulting in interruptions, delays or errors. We will endeavour to schedule maintenance outside periods of heavy submission activity.

KEEP YOUR OWN COPIES OF YOUR WORK. The Services are where your supervision happens; they are not a substitute for your own backups. We are not liable for any loss or damage caused by your inability to access or use the Services during any downtime or discontinuance.

We may revise these Legal Terms from time to time. When we do, we update the “Last updated” date at the top of this page and record the revised version against accounts that accept it.

Where a revision materially affects your rights or obligations, we will notify you before it takes effect and ask you to accept the revised Legal Terms. Continued use of the Services after a non-material revision constitutes acceptance of it.

THE SERVICES ARE PROVIDED ON AN “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE” BASIS. TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN CONNECTION WITH THE SERVICES AND YOUR USE OF THEM, INCLUDING THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, AND NON-INFRINGEMENT.

WE MAKE NO WARRANTY AS TO THE ACCURACY OR COMPLETENESS OF THE SERVICES’ CONTENT OR OF ANY MATERIAL GENERATED BY AN ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE FEATURE, AND WE ASSUME NO LIABILITY FOR ANY ERROR OR OMISSION, ANY UNAUTHORISED ACCESS TO OUR SERVERS OR TO PERSONAL DATA STORED IN THEM, ANY INTERRUPTION OF TRANSMISSION, OR ANY LOSS OR DAMAGE ARISING FROM THE USE OF THE SERVICES.

WE DO NOT WARRANT THAT USE OF THE SERVICES WILL RESULT IN ANY PARTICULAR ACADEMIC OUTCOME, GRADE, APPROVAL OR AWARD.

Nothing in this section excludes or limits any liability that cannot be excluded or limited under the laws of Ghana.

TO THE FULLEST EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, WE AND OUR DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES AND AGENTS WILL NOT BE LIABLE TO YOU OR ANY THIRD PARTY FOR ANY INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, EXEMPLARY, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES, INCLUDING LOSS OF PROFIT, LOSS OF DATA, OR LOSS OF OPPORTUNITY, ARISING FROM YOUR USE OF THE SERVICES, EVEN IF WE HAVE BEEN ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES.

OUR TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY TO YOU FOR ANY CAUSE WHATSOEVER, AND REGARDLESS OF THE FORM OF THE ACTION, IS LIMITED TO THE AMOUNT YOU PAID US IN THE TWELVE MONTHS PRECEDING THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM.

Nothing in this section excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

You agree to indemnify and hold us harmless from any loss, damage, liability, claim or demand, including reasonable legal fees, made by any third party and arising from your use of the Services, your breach of these Legal Terms, your breach of your representations and warranties, your Contributions, or your infringement of a third party’s rights.

We reserve the right, at your expense, to assume the exclusive defence and control of any matter for which you are required to indemnify us, and you agree to cooperate with our defence of such claims.

There may be information in the Services that contains typographical errors, inaccuracies or omissions, including in descriptions, pricing and availability. We reserve the right to correct any error or omission and to change or update information at any time, without prior notice.

These Legal Terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Republic of Ghana, without regard to conflict of law principles.

If a dispute arises between you and us, we both agree first to attempt to resolve it informally. You should contact support@pitulo.io with a description of the dispute, and we will attempt in good faith to resolve it within thirty (30) days.

If the dispute is not resolved informally, it will be submitted to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Ghana. Nothing in this section prevents either party from seeking injunctive or other equitable relief to protect its intellectual property rights.

Visiting the Services, sending us email, and completing online forms constitute electronic communications. You consent to receive communications electronically, and you agree that all agreements, notices, disclosures and other communications we provide to you electronically satisfy any legal requirement that they be in writing.

YOU CONSENT TO THE USE OF ELECTRONIC SIGNATURES, CONTRACTS, ORDERS AND OTHER RECORDS, AND TO THE ELECTRONIC DELIVERY OF NOTICES, POLICIES AND RECORDS OF TRANSACTIONS INITIATED OR COMPLETED THROUGH THE SERVICES. Acceptance of these Legal Terms is recorded against your account together with the version accepted and the date and time of acceptance.

These Legal Terms, together with any policies or operating rules we post on the Services, constitute the entire agreement between you and us. Our failure to exercise or enforce any right or provision does not operate as a waiver of it.

We may assign our rights and obligations to another party at any time. You may not assign yours without our prior written consent.

If any provision of these Legal Terms is determined to be unlawful, void or unenforceable, that provision is severable and does not affect the validity and enforceability of the remaining provisions.

No joint venture, partnership, employment or agency relationship is created between you and us as a result of these Legal Terms or your use of the Services.

To resolve a complaint regarding the Services, to make a request about your personal data, or to receive further information about their use, contact us at support@pitulo.io.