Beacon Terms of Use

These Terms apply to your use of Beacon, the special education and autism support app operated by Spectrum Unlocked (“we,” “us”). By creating a Beacon account or using any part of the app, you agree to these Terms. If you don't agree, please don't use Beacon.

These Terms work alongside our Privacy Policy, which explains what we collect and how we use it.

Beacon is for adults. By using Beacon, you confirm that:

• You're at least 18 years old.
• You're a parent, guardian, or adult caregiver of an autistic child; an adult autistic person documenting your own support needs; or a professional who supports autistic and other disabled people in your work, such as a teacher, paraprofessional, SLP, OT, BCBA, or RBT.
• You have the legal right to share the information you put into Beacon, including information about your child. If you are using Beacon professionally, this means you are responsible for following your employer's policies and the laws that govern student and client records where you work. Beacon is a thinking and drafting tool, not a system of record: do not put anything into it that you are not permitted to.
• You're not on any sanctions list and you're not using Beacon on behalf of an organization under sanctions.

• Keep your sign-in details private. You're responsible for activity on your account.
• Give us accurate information when you set up your child's profile and when you update it. Beacon's responses get less useful if the profile drifts.
• If you suspect someone else has accessed your account, email beacon@spectrumunlocked.com so we can help secure it.

Beacon uses AI to help you think through parenting challenges, draft school communications, translate IEP documents, and reflect on patterns. The AI is useful, and it's wrong sometimes. It can misread a document, miss a subtlety, or give advice that sounds confident but shouldn't be applied without human judgment.

Beacon does not replace:

• A physician, therapist, psychologist, or BCBA for medical, behavioral, or psychological advice.
• A special education advocate, attorney, or school district official for IEP / 504 / legal guidance.
• A crisis service. If your child (or you) is in immediate danger, contact 911, the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, or your local emergency services.
• The professional judgment of the team responsible for a student's education, or a formal evaluation. Beacon can help you think a decision through and draft what you want to say; it does not make the decision or stand in for an assessment.

Always verify IEP breakdowns against the original document before signing anything. AI extraction is a starting point, not a substitute for reading the document yourself with an advocate or case manager if anything is unclear.

While using Beacon, please don't:

• Upload documents that aren't yours to share, or that contain another person's sensitive information without their consent. If you are a teacher or therapist working with a student, see Student records you enter below.
• Use Beacon to harass, threaten, defame, or harm another person, including teachers, therapists, ex-partners, or co-parents.
• Attempt to extract data from other users, bypass rate limits, scrape the app, or reverse-engineer our AI prompts.
• Use Beacon to generate content that's illegal, hateful, sexually explicit, or that sexualizes minors.
• Share your account, resell Beacon access, or otherwise use Beacon as a commercial product for clients.

We may suspend or terminate accounts that violate these rules.

This section applies only to professional accounts using Caseload. If you are a parent using Beacon for your own child, it does not apply to you.

Before you save your first student, you confirm that you work with these students and are authorized to keep your own notes about them. You are responsible for that being true, and for following whatever rules your school, district or employer sets about where student information may be kept. If your employer says not to, don't.

We have no agreement with your district. Beacon is not a district system, we are not a party to your district's data agreements, and using Beacon does not create one. What you keep here is your own working copy. Your district's system remains the official record.

Initials or a nickname, never a full name. Caseload has no field for a student's full name, and you agree not to enter one, or a date of birth, address, phone number, student ID or any other detail that identifies a student, anywhere in Beacon, including in chat.

Beacon does not keep you compliant. It does not track IDEA or state timelines for you, it does not guarantee that a goal, service or minutes total meets any legal requirement, and nothing it produces is legal advice. Verify against the source document and your district's process before you rely on it.

You can correct, archive or delete any student record at any time, and deleting removes everything attached to that student permanently. See the Caseload section of our Privacy Policy for exactly what is stored.

Beacon offers a free tier and paid plans. Paid plans are processed by Stripe. By starting a paid subscription, you authorize us (via Stripe) to charge your payment method according to the plan you selected.

• Auto-renewal: paid plans renew automatically at the end of each billing period until you cancel. You can cancel any time in Settings; your plan stays active until the end of the already-paid period, then drops to the free tier.
• Refunds: if something went wrong, double charge, upgrade you didn't authorize, failed service, email beacon@spectrumunlocked.com and we'll make it right. We don't issue automatic refunds for partial months, but we read every request from a real person.
• Failed payment: if your card fails, Beacon drops to the free tier. You can restore your plan in Settings without losing any saved data.
• Price changes: if we change subscription prices, we'll notify you by email and in the app at least 30 days before the change applies to your account.
• Taxes: prices shown don't include applicable sales tax. Stripe calculates and collects taxes where required.

• You own the content you put into Beacon (your messages, your child's profile, your uploads).
• You can use Beacon's AI-generated outputs (social stories, draft emails, IEP breakdowns, etc.) in your personal life however you wish. No attribution required.
• Don't pass off AI-generated content as a human professional's output (e.g. don't submit a Beacon-written behavior plan as your BCBA's).
• We don't claim copyright over Beacon's AI outputs to you. We also can't guarantee AI output is unique, two parents asking similar questions may receive similar answers.

The Beacon app itself, the code, design, brand, copy, system prompts, and underlying product, is ours (Spectrum Unlocked). These Terms don't grant you any right to copy, modify, or redistribute the app.

Features like “Pass the Baton,” sensory-card share, schedule share, and Rewind/Playback share create public URLs accessible to anyone who has the link. You're responsible for who you send those links to. You can revoke a share link from the same surface that created it, any time.

• You can stop any time. Sign out, cancel your subscription, or email us to delete your account.
• We can suspend or terminate your account if you break these Terms, if we're required to by law, or if we discontinue the app. In the last case we'll give you at least 30 days' notice to export your data.
• After termination, we delete your Supabase data per our Privacy Policy.

Beacon is provided “as is” and “as available” without warranties of any kind, whether express or implied. We don't warrant that the AI's output is accurate, that the app will be uninterrupted, or that it will meet your specific needs.

To the maximum extent permitted by law, our total liability to you for any claim arising out of Beacon is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or US$100, whichever is greater. We aren't liable for indirect, incidental, special, or consequential damages.

Some jurisdictions don't allow these limits; in those places, the limits apply to the fullest extent allowed.

You agree to indemnify and hold Beacon and Spectrum Unlocked harmless from claims arising out of your misuse of the app, including uploading content you don't have the right to share or using Beacon in violation of these Terms.

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of Texas, USA, without regard to conflict-of-laws principles. Any dispute that can't be resolved informally will be handled in the state or federal courts located in Texas, and you consent to venue there.

Before filing any legal action, email us first at beacon@spectrumunlocked.com. We'll try to resolve the issue directly, most things can be sorted out that way.

We may update these Terms. If we make a material change, we'll notify you in the app and by email at least 14 days before it takes effect. Continued use of Beacon after the change means you accept the updated Terms.

Questions about these Terms: beacon@spectrumunlocked.com.