Terms of Use

Last updated: November 9, 2026

1. Who we are

Socratly (socratly.ai and each book's site at bookCode.socratly.ai) is run by PaceWorks LLC, a limited liability company of the State of California ("we"). By opening an account or using Socratly, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use Socratly.

2. Who these Terms cover

• Readers: anyone who browses Socratly or opens an account to ask questions about a book. Sections 1–7 and 10–16 apply to you.
• BookAdmins: authors, educators and others who run a book's question-and-answer portal. Sections 1–4, 8 and 10–16 apply to you, and sections 5–7 when you also ask questions.
• Experts: people a BookAdmin invites to review or write answers. Sections 1–4, 9 and 10–16 apply to you.
• Sponsoring organizations that pay for their members' questions are covered by these Terms and by the order they place with us.

3. Your account

• You must be at least 18 to open an account. By opening one, you confirm that you are.
• Give a real name and an email address you control, and keep your password to yourself. You are responsible for what is done with your account.
• One person, one account. Accounts, points and Fan Club memberships cannot be sold or transferred.
• Tell us at once at contact@paceworks.com if you think someone else is using your account.

4. Points, purchases and Fan Clubs

• Points pay for answers. Each book shows its answer price in points before you ask. A question with "Privacy On" costs twice the standard price; a question with "Ask the Author" is a Premium Question, and is processed differently, as set forth in the following section. For standard questions, points are taken when the answer is delivered.
• Ask the Author Option. A Premium Question requires an upfront Submission processing fee. Reaching the author is not guaranteed: your question first goes through a selection process (automated checks against spam and the author's own criteria), and the author alone decides whether to answer it, without giving a reason. The processing fee is charged when you send the question, includes the usual AI answer, and is not refunded if the question is not selected, or if the author declines it or does not respond in time. It is refunded only if there is a technical defect that impedes the selection. If the author answers in writing, or suggests a live session, then the Acceptance processing fee shown when you asked is charged, and is not refunded if you then do not book the session. A live session is arranged directly with the author, who may charge their own price for it, independently from Socratly. We may limit how often you can ask an author. A question rejected as spam, by our checks or by the author, counts as a Strike. The following section covers how Strikes are processed.
• Strikes. Misuse of the system (spam, or other illegal attempts) result in a Strike on your account. If your account has 2 strikes on a book, you will no longer be able to send a request to the author of that book. With 3 strikes across all books, your account will be closed, and you will forfeit all points in your account with no refunds.
• Points are not money. They cannot be exchanged for cash, refunded as cash (except as below), sold or transferred. Free points, such as those given at sign-up or for a proof of purchase, have no cash value at all. Points do not expire while your account is open.
• Buying points. Payments are handled by Square; prices are shown at checkout in US dollars. If we refund a purchase, the points it bought are removed from your balance. Within 14 days of a purchase, you may ask for a refund of the purchased points you have not used, at contact@paceworks.com.
• Points back for a poor answer. A BookAdmin, or we, may give back the points for an answer that was not up to standard. This is at their discretion and is not a right.
• Fan Clubs. A book's Fan Club costs the monthly points shown when you join. Points are taken on the 1st of each month. You can cancel at any time; the month already paid is not refunded. If your balance is too low on the 1st, your membership ends.
• Purchase rewards. A BookAdmin may give points for a proof that you bought their book offline. One reward per reader per book. A proof must be genuine and your own: a false or borrowed proof ends the reward and may end your account with no refund for unused points.
• Price changes. We or the BookAdmin may change prices. A change applies only to future questions and to questions not yet answered.
• Attempts to misuse the AI. A question designed to extract a book's full text or to get around a BookAdmin's limits (section 10) results in an additional Strike in your account. If your account had no Strike prior to your misuse attempt, the penalty costs 3 times the book's standard question price. If your account already has 1 strike, then the penalty is 5 times the standard price. If your account already has 2 strikes, all the points left in your account are forfeited and your account is closed, with no refund.

5. Readers: questions and answers

• What an answer is. Most answers are written by AI from the book's own material, and some are reviewed or written by the book's BookAdmin or an Expert. An answer is an interpretation of the book, not professional advice: it is not medical, legal, financial or psychological advice, and AI answers can be wrong. Check anything that matters to you.
• Not the author's word. Unless an answer says the BookAdmin wrote or approved it, it does not speak for the author.
• Private questions. With Privacy on, your question and its answer are stored encrypted and readable only by you, and by an Expert if you send it for expert review.
• Sharing. When you share a question on the Shared Questions Board or by link, its text and answer become public, without your name, and stay public even if you later delete the question.
• Ratings. Your thumbs up or down and comments are seen by the book's BookAdmin and help them improve answers. Please keep comments civil and only about the answer.

6. Readers: how we may use your questions and ratings

1. What this covers. Your questions, follow-ups and ratings (thumbs up or down and written comments) are called "your contributions" here.
2. How we use them. Unless you turned on Privacy for a question, you agree that PaceWorks LLC may store your contributions and use them to run, evaluate and improve Socratly, including its AI: for example learning which answers readers found helpful, recognizing questions already answered, and suggesting questions to other readers.
3. Reuse of answers. An answer to a question asked without Privacy may be shown, without your name, to another reader who asks the same or a very similar question about the same book.
4. Privacy. We never use a question asked with Privacy on, its answer or your rating of it for these purposes, and never show them to other readers. Privacy applies only to questions asked while it is on.
5. Service providers. To produce answers, the text of your questions, including private ones, is sent to Google's AI services. Your name and email address are not sent with it.
6. What we do not do. We do not sell your contributions, and we never use your name, email address or payment details to train AI.
7. Deleting a question. If you delete a question, it and its answer are erased from your account and no longer used for these purposes. Shared copies stay public. A copy may remain for a limited time in the working history of the AI service, which we clear regularly. Improvements made before the deletion cannot be undone.
8. Earlier questions. These Terms apply only going forward, not to questions asked and answered before they took effect.

7. Readers: published questions

A BookAdmin may publish some of their book's sample questions, with answers they approved, as public pages for search engines and AI chatbots. A sample question may be worded from questions readers asked, but a published page never names a reader associated with the question or its answer.

8. BookAdmins

• Your material. You may upload a book's text, excerpts, recordings, images and other material only if you own it or have the right to use it this way. You keep ownership. You give PaceWorks LLC a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to store it, send it to our service providers (Google's Gemini Notebook and Gemini API) and use it to answer readers and run your portal, for as long as your portal is open.
• Your answers and settings. You are responsible for the answers you write or approve, the prices, intro texts, Fan Club texts and purchase-reward amounts you set, and for keeping them lawful and accurate.
• Readers' data. You see readers' names, their questions about your book, their ratings and any proof of purchase they upload for it. Use this only to run your portal: never to contact readers outside Socratly, sell their data or share it. Proof-of-purchase screenshots are for checking the reward and nothing else.
• Published Q&As. You may publish up to the number of sample questions set in your dashboard (10 by default) as public pages. You confirm each published answer before it goes live, and you must not publish anything that identifies a reader.
• Video clips. Clips you order are made by HeyGen from the script or audio you give and the presenter you choose. You need the rights to any audio you upload, such as a song. Points for a clip are taken when it is made and are not refunded if you do not like the result. You may post clips on your own social media accounts; mentions of Socratly or the portal address must stay accurate. When you choose to have a clip posted on Socratly's own social media accounts, you allow PaceWorks LLC to post it there to promote your book; you can ask us to remove it at any time.
• Plans and earnings. Your subscription plan is billed by Square at the price and cycle shown when you subscribe. You earn the commission rate shown in your dashboard on the points readers paid for with real money and spend on your book's answers and on its Ask the Author processing fees; free points earn no commission. From December 2026, your commission is counted in points. At the end of each month, your balance is converted to US dollars at that month's average price of a point sold, once it reaches the minimum shown in your dashboard, and paid by the end of the following month; a smaller balance carries over to the next month. Commissions on answers whose points are given back are reversed in the month they are given back.
• Closing your portal. You may close your account at any time. When it closes, your subscription is cancelled, unanswered questions receive a closure notice and are not charged, and your books go offline. We keep records of the closure and of your earnings as the law requires. We may later bring a book back with a new BookAdmin only where the rights allow it.

9. Experts

• Your role. A BookAdmin invites you to review or write answers for their book. You answer in your own name and within your field; you do not speak for the author unless the BookAdmin says you do.
• Confidentiality. You see questions sent to you for review, including private ones. Keep them confidential: use them only to answer, never copy, share or keep them outside Socratly, and never contact the reader outside Socratly.
• Your answers. You are responsible for the accuracy of what you write. You keep ownership of your answers and give PaceWorks LLC the same licence as for BookAdmins' material, so the answer can be shown to the reader and stored.
• Pay. You negotiate your revenue share with the BookAdmin who hired you. Socratly is not involved in any way in your agreement with your BookAdmin.
• Ending the role. You or the BookAdmin may end your Expert role at any time. Questions already sent to you then become the BookAdmin's responsibility.

10. Acceptable use

Do not use Socratly to:

• post anything unlawful, hateful, harassing, sexually explicit, or that infringes someone else's rights;
• ask questions designed to extract a book's full text, or to get around the limits a BookAdmin set;
• probe, overload or attack the site, or get around its anti-bot checks;
• copy answers or pages in bulk with automated tools, except search engines and AI crawlers that respect our robots.txt;
• open several accounts to collect free points or rewards, or use someone else's account or proof of purchase;
• pretend to be someone else, including an author.

11. What belongs to whom

• The site, its design, its software and the Socratly name belong to PaceWorks LLC.
• Books and material belong to their authors and rights holders, as uploaded by BookAdmins (section 8).
• You keep the rights to your questions and comments, and give us the licence in section 6 to use them.
• You may read and share answers for your own, non-commercial use, with a link back to Socratly. Published Q&A pages may be quoted with a link.
• If you believe something on Socratly infringes your copyright, write to contact@paceworks.com with the details the law requires, and we will remove it if the claim is valid.

12. Ending your account

• You may close your account at any time, in My Profile (Danger Zone). Points left in your balance are lost when you close it; Fan Club memberships end.
• We may suspend or close an account that breaks these Terms, with notice where we can. If we close an account without cause, we refund the purchased points still unused.
• Sections 4 (points are not money), 6, 11, 13, 14 and 15 continue after an account closes.

13. Disclaimers

Socratly services are provided "as is." We work to keep them available and their answers accurate, but we do not promise that they will always be available, error-free, or that any answer is correct or complete. Answers depend on AI services and on material provided by BookAdmins, which we do not control.

14. Limits on our liability

To the extent the law allows, PaceWorks LLC is not liable for indirect or consequential losses, or for decisions you make based on an answer. Our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or US$100 if that is more. Nothing here limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

You agree to cover PaceWorks LLC's losses caused by your breach of these Terms or by material you uploaded without the right to do so.

15. Law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California. Disputes go to the courts of Contra Costa County, California, unless the law of your country gives you the right to go to your own courts.

16. Changes and contact

We will post any change to these Terms on this page with a new date. If a change matters to you, we will tell account holders by email at least 30 days before it takes effect; continuing to use Socratly after that means you accept it.

Contact: PaceWorks LLC, 3130 Balfour Road, #D-408, Brentwood, CA 94513-5516, USA — contact@paceworks.com