Terms of Service

Haven is an online education marketplace. Students and guardians discover teachers, buy courses, communicate through Haven, and take part in online learning.

By creating an account, buying a course, or using Haven, you agree to these Terms and to the policies referenced in them, including the Privacy Policy, the Trust & Safety rules, and the live-class safeguards.

Where a parent or guardian creates an account, makes a purchase, or gives consent for someone under 18, that adult confirms they have the authority to do so.

Haven connects students with independent teachers who have been identity-verified and approved. Teachers build structured courses made of sections and lessons, set their own price, and publish to Haven's catalogue.

Course details — the teacher, the price, the curriculum and what is included — are shown on the course page before you buy.

Teachers complete Haven's onboarding before they can offer anything. That means identity verification through Persona, a third-party identity provider, and a separate manual review of the teacher's profile by Haven staff before it can be listed.

An identity check confirms that a person is who they say they are. It does not confirm any qualification, credential, employment history, or claim a teacher makes about their expertise, and Haven does not independently verify those.

A teacher on Haven is an independent contractor, not an employee, partner or agent of Haven. Teachers set their own course content, price, schedule and teaching approach. Haven does not supervise teaching, and teachers are responsible for their own taxes.

Haven may suspend, restrict, or remove a teacher where that is necessary for safety, quality, compliance, or the integrity of the platform.

Haven's minimum age is 13. Both students and teachers on Haven may be under 18.

You do not need a parent or legal guardian linked to your account in order to buy a course, enroll in it, reach its lessons, or attend its live classes. Linking a guardian is optional, and being under 18 does not by itself require one.

Where a guardian is linked to your account, they accept these Terms on your behalf at the point the link is claimed, and they are responsible for your use of Haven. In most U.S. states a person under 18 cannot be bound by a contract.

Guardian links are made in two steps. A student generates a single-use code that expires after a day and gives it to their guardian, who redeems it on their own Haven account. That records who claimed the link — it does not by itself grant anything. Haven staff then verify the relationship, and record how it was verified, before the link takes effect.

Teachers set their own prices. Prices are shown in U.S. dollars, and any applicable tax is added at checkout before you pay.

Payments are processed by Stripe. Card details are entered into Stripe Checkout — Haven never receives or stores your card number.

Each paid enrollment is a Stripe Connect destination charge. Stripe takes Haven's 15% platform fee as an application fee at the moment of the charge and settles the remaining 85% into the teacher's own connected Stripe account. Stripe pays that account out on Stripe's own schedule. Haven holds no teacher balance and runs no payout of its own.

Haven's working draft requires that a purchaser affirmatively accept the applicable Terms and the Refund and Cancellation Policy before a payment can complete, and that the payment flow record the purchaser, the order, the acceptance timestamp, and the policy version for audit and dispute purposes.

Haven does not do this yet. Today the Terms and Privacy Policy are linked at signup and from every page, and checkout does not capture a separate, versioned acceptance record.

Haven's intended policy is that an eligible purchase may be cancelled for a full refund when the request is made within 24 hours of purchase.

After that window, refunds are not automatic. Contact support@havencourses.com and the request will be considered on its facts and under applicable law.

Refunds are raised through Stripe against the original charge and are reversed from the teacher's connected account and from Haven's platform fee proportionally. They are not deducted from a later Haven payout, because Haven runs none.

Haven does not currently offer scheduled one-to-one tutoring sessions, so there is no student cancellation window and no no-show rule in force.

Haven's working draft proposes that students cancel or reschedule at least six hours before a scheduled session, and proposes a 50% refund of the affected lesson value for an unexplained student no-show. Those are proposals. They are not terms, and they do not bind anyone today.

If a teacher does not deliver what was advertised — a course is withdrawn, or its content is not what the course page described — you are entitled to a full refund regardless of how much of it you have worked through. Email support@havencourses.com.

Where live classes are concerned, Haven's approach is to arrange a replacement or rescheduled session at no additional charge, and to refund the affected lesson value in full where no acceptable rescheduling can be arranged. Like every other refund, this is raised by a person through support rather than by a button in the product.

Repeated cancellations or failures to deliver may lead Haven to review, restrict, or suspend a teacher's account.

Haven does not sell multi-lesson tutoring packages. A course is bought once, as a whole, and there is no per-lesson allocation of its price, no lesson-completion confirmation step, and no disputed-lesson hold.

Where a course is refunded after purchase, the refund is split proportionally between the teacher's share and Haven's platform fee, so a refund does not come out of one side alone.

Haven Chat is available between a verified teacher and a student enrolled in one of that teacher's courses. It exists for coursework. Students cannot message each other, teachers cannot message students who have not enrolled with them, and there is no way to search for a person and open a conversation. This is enforced in Haven's database, not by hiding buttons.

Messages are automatically scanned for phone numbers, email addresses, links to external sites, and references to off-platform messaging or payment services. Matches are flagged for review by a human moderator.

Messages are retained after you delete them. Deleting removes a message from your view; Haven keeps the underlying record so that a report made later can still be investigated.

Any message, user, or course can be reported from inside the product, or by emailing support@havencourses.com. Reports go to a moderation queue that a human reviews, with flagged conversations prioritised. The person you report is never told who filed the report.

You can also block another user, which ends the conversation immediately. A block is not visible to the person blocked.

Blocking someone does not delete the record of what was said. Haven keeps those records for safety, dispute, and legal purposes — that is the point of keeping them.

If you believe someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first. Haven is not an emergency service and cannot respond at emergency speed.

Live classes are available. Sessions are hosted on Zoom, on a Zoom account Haven controls rather than a teacher's personal login. Haven does not use Google Meet or any other conferencing provider, and will update these Terms before it does.

Joining a class requires a Zoom account of your own: meetings are set to admit authenticated participants only, so a Haven join link forwarded to somebody else is not enough on its own to get them in.

The safeguards that apply — enrollment checks, guardian consent, teacher eligibility, blocking, waiting rooms, authenticated participants — are published at Live class safeguards.

Every live class is recorded. Haven creates each meeting with Zoom's cloud recording switched on, so a session records automatically from the moment the teacher starts it.

Recordings exist for educational, safety, quality and dispute-resolution purposes. Live class safeguards describes what is recorded and how long it is kept.

Recordings and transcripts are deleted from Haven's active Zoom recording store seven days after the class, by a job that runs nightly. Zoom may retain deleted recordings in its own trash for its own recovery window.

Only an authorized Haven administrator can access a recording or its transcript. Students cannot, and neither can the teacher who hosted the class or a linked guardian. Recordings are not routinely reviewed by staff. They may be used as evidence in a dispute or a safety investigation.

Haven does not currently run small-group cohorts. There are no class capacity limits, no waitlists, and no batches.

Haven's working draft describes an intention to emphasise small-group learning, but gives two different maximum class sizes in two different places. Nothing is stated here as a rule until that is resolved and the feature exists.

Haven has no review system. No student can submit a written review, and nothing in Haven records one.

A course record and a teacher profile each carry an average-rating and a rating-count field. Nothing in Haven writes to those fields, so there is no rating to show and none is shown. Where a figure would appear it comes from that record and nowhere else — it is never a student-submitted review, and Haven publishes no review text, no testimonial and no reviewer name.

Haven's intention is that only students who have completed an eligible paid Haven service may submit a verified public review, that reviews must reflect genuine experience, and that Haven may moderate a review for safety, privacy, abuse, spam, or disclosure of personal information — but will not suppress a legitimate review merely because it is negative.

Depending on severity, Haven may warn, restrict, suspend, or terminate an account.

Haven relies on third parties to operate. Each of these is a real, current dependency — Haven does not list a provider it does not use.

Haven is provided as-is. We do not guarantee that it will be uninterrupted or error-free, and we may change, suspend, or discontinue features.

Haven is a marketplace. We verify teacher identity. We do not verify teaching quality, qualifications, or the accuracy of course content, and Haven is not a party to the arrangement between a teacher and a student.

Where a change materially affects your legal rights, your payments, or your privacy, Haven will give notice before it takes effect.

Haven's site, branding, software, and original platform materials are protected by intellectual-property law.

Teachers own the courses and materials they create, and grant Haven a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, display, and deliver that content to enrolled students. The licence lasts while the content is on Haven, plus a reasonable period afterwards so that students who already enrolled can still be served.

A teacher confirms that their content is theirs to share and does not infringe anyone's rights. Students may not copy, redistribute, resell, record, or commercially exploit a teacher's materials.

If you believe content on Haven infringes your copyright, email support@havencourses.com with enough detail to identify the work and the material you are complaining about, and Haven will review it.

You can ask Haven to close your account at any time. Go to Settings, then Security, and contact support from there, or email support@havencourses.com directly. Haven does not yet have a one-click self-service delete, and this page will not pretend it does.

Haven may suspend or close an account for serious or repeated policy violations, fraud, safety concerns, non-payment, unlawful activity, or attempted circumvention of the platform. Where there is a safety risk we may act immediately and without notice; otherwise, where appropriate, we will tell you why and give you a way to respond.

Some information survives account closure — safety and moderation records, transaction records, and anything Haven must keep by law.

Haven does not guarantee any SAT, AP, examination, school, grade, college-admission, or scholarship outcome.

Teachers and courses can help a student learn and prepare. What a student achieves depends on many things outside Haven's control.

This section is deliberately incomplete.

Haven's working draft states that no final limitation-of-liability language should be adopted from it without qualified legal review, and that the production version must address educational services, teacher relationships, third-party services, service interruptions, consumer rights, indirect and consequential damages, and the limits that cannot lawfully be waived.

Rather than invent that language, Haven states the position plainly: no limitation of liability, damages cap, or disclaimer has been settled for these Terms. Nothing in this document limits any liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

This section is deliberately incomplete, and its content has not been chosen.

Before launch, Haven must identify the legal entity that operates havencourses.com and then determine the governing law, the dispute-resolution procedure, the venue, and whether any arbitration or class-action provision applies. Haven's working draft states that these provisions are intentionally not invented, and they are not invented here.

There is no arbitration agreement and no class-action waiver in these Terms. If either is ever adopted, it will be published here, with notice, before it takes effect.

Questions, cancellations, safety concerns, payment questions, and support requests all go to the same place.

Email support@havencourses.com. Haven answers within 3 to 5 days. There is no postal address and no phone line — all contact is by email.

If someone is in immediate danger, contact your local emergency services first, then tell us.