Legal
Terms of Service
1. The agreement
By creating an account or using Bandly you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the service. If you are under 18, you may use Bandly only with the consent of a parent or guardian.
2. What Bandly is
Bandly is an independent practice tool for IELTS writing. You submit an essay and it returns an estimated band score across the four public band descriptor criteria, together with sentence level corrections and feedback. It is a study aid. It is not a test, not an examination service, and not a qualification.
3. Bandly uses AI, and AI can make mistakes
Read this section before you rely on anything Bandly tells you. Every band score, criterion score, correction, rewrite and comment in Bandly is generated by artificial intelligence. It is an estimate produced by software, not a mark awarded by a qualified examiner, and it can be wrong.
How AI is used. Bandly is built on large language models supplied by third party AI providers. When you submit an essay, the text of that essay and related inputs are transmitted to and processed by those providers so that a score and feedback can be generated.
AI output is probabilistic, not a measurement. It is an estimate with real error attached. Without limitation, Bandly may:
- return a band that is higher or lower than a qualified human examiner would award, sometimes by a full band or more;
- return a different result for the same essay on a different submission;
- misjudge task response, coherence, lexical range or grammatical accuracy, including missing an error that is there or flagging one that is not;
- suggest a correction or rewrite that is wrong, unnatural, or that introduces a new error;
- state something confidently that is simply not true, which is commonly called a hallucination;
- misread the task type, the prompt, or the intent of what you wrote.
Our scoring has not been validated against qualified human examiners. We have not run our scores against a set of essays marked by certified IELTS examiners, so we do not publish and do not claim any accuracy rate, any agreement rate with official results, or any margin such as being within half a band. Where our scoring differs from an official result, it may differ in either direction. Treat every band Bandly gives you as a rough practice signal only.
Do not use Bandly to make consequential decisions. In particular, you should not rely on a Bandly estimate, alone or at all, to decide whether to sit or postpone an official IELTS test, whether to pay a test fee, whether you meet the writing requirement for a visa, immigration application, university admission, professional registration or employment, or whether to submit or withdraw any such application. Those decisions carry real money and real deadlines, and only an official IELTS result from an authorised test centre can answer them.
Verify with a human. We recommend having a qualified teacher, tutor or examiner review your writing alongside anything Bandly produces. You are responsible for exercising your own judgement about the feedback you receive and for deciding what to act on.
A human is always in control. Bandly does not make automated decisions that produce legal effects for you or that similarly significantly affect you. It produces study feedback; every decision arising from it is yours.
No warranty on AI output. All scores, corrections and feedback are provided on an as is and as available basis, with no warranty of any kind, express or implied, as to accuracy, reliability, completeness, consistency, or fitness for any particular purpose. If you believe a score or correction is wrong, please tell us at hello@bandly.shop. We review reports, but we do not promise any accuracy rate.
4. Not an official IELTS score, and no affiliation
Bandly is not affiliated with, endorsed by, accredited by, or connected to Cambridge Assessment English, the British Council, IDP Education, or any authorised IELTS test centre. IELTS is a registered trademark of its respective owners and is used here only to describe the exam our tool helps you practise for.
A Bandly estimate is not an official IELTS band score, has no official standing, cannot be submitted to any institution, government body or employer, and does not predict or guarantee the result you will receive on test day. Only an authorised test centre can issue an IELTS result.
5. Your account
- You need a valid email address to register, and you are responsible for keeping your login secure.
- One account per person. Do not share your account or resell access to it.
- You are responsible for everything done through your account.
6. Plans, billing and cancellation
- Your first essay is scored in full with no card required. Paid plans are required to continue submitting essays.
- Weekly and monthly plans renew automatically at the price shown at checkout until you cancel. The yearly plan is billed once for the year.
- You can cancel at any time from your account settings. Cancellation stops the next charge and takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for. We do not pro rate part periods except where the refund guarantee below applies or where the law requires it.
- Prices can change. We will tell you before a change affects a renewal.
- Taxes may be added depending on where you are.
Nothing in this section removes any statutory cancellation or refund right you have as a consumer where you live.
7. The refund guarantee
If you submit at least five essays, act on the feedback, and your practice band has not moved, email us within seven days of your purchase and we will refund you in full. Ask by email at hello@bandly.shop. There is no form to fill in.
The guarantee is about your practice band inside Bandly. Because our scoring is an AI estimate and is not validated against human examiners, as explained in section 3, the guarantee is not a promise about your official IELTS result and we do not offer any refund, compensation or remedy based on the score you receive on test day.
8. Your essays and your data
- You keep ownership of the essays and text you submit.
- You grant us the limited licence needed to process, store and display your work so we can operate the service for you, including sending it to the third party AI providers described in section 3.
- Do not submit personal information about other people, confidential material, or anything you do not have the right to share. Essays are practice writing, so please keep them free of sensitive personal data.
- You can delete your essays from your account. Our handling of personal data is described in our privacy policy.
9. Acceptable use
You agree not to:
- use Bandly to cheat, to produce work you will pass off as your own in an examination or assessment, or to breach the rules of any test provider or institution;
- present a Bandly estimate to anyone as if it were an official IELTS result;
- resell, sublicense or redistribute the service or its output as a commercial scoring service without our written permission;
- scrape, reverse engineer, or attempt to extract the underlying prompts, models or scoring logic;
- submit unlawful, abusive or infringing content, attempt to access another user's account, or otherwise interfere with the service.
10. Limitation of liability
The service is provided on an as is and as available basis, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including implied warranties of accuracy, merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non infringement, to the fullest extent permitted by law. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted or error free.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for:
- any inaccuracy, inconsistency, omission or hallucination in an AI generated score, correction or comment, or for any reliance you place on one;
- any test fee, application fee, tuition cost, travel cost, lost opportunity, missed deadline, visa or admission outcome, immigration consequence, or lost earnings arising from your use of Bandly or from a difference between a Bandly estimate and an official IELTS result;
- indirect, incidental, consequential or punitive damages of any kind.
Our total liability for any claim relating to the service is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim.
Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including liability for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, and nothing here affects your non waivable rights as a consumer.
11. Changes and termination
We may update these terms. If a change is material we will give reasonable notice by email or in the app before it takes effect, and continuing to use Bandly after that means you accept it. The current version always lives at this page.
You can stop using Bandly and close your account at any time. We may suspend or close an account that breaches these terms, that abuses the free first essay across multiple accounts, or that puts the service at risk. Where it is reasonable to warn first, we will.
12. Governing law and contact
These terms are governed by the law of the jurisdiction in which Bandly is established, without affecting any mandatory consumer protection rights available to you where you live. Questions about these terms go to hello@bandly.shop.