Terms of service

Who we are

SailStarter teaches sailing fundamentals through short lessons and quizzes. These terms are the agreement between you and SailStarter. They cover the marketing site at sailstarter.com and the learning app at sailstarter.com/app, and using either one means you accept them.

SailStarter is operated by Ihor Tykhonenko. Our business address is 91-1037 Cleveland Ave, Riverview, NB E1B 0T9.

Questions about these terms go to one email address: tikhonenkoigor@gmail.com. A person reads it.

What SailStarter is

SailStarter is a beginner sailing course: short lessons on the fundamentals, each one ending in a quiz. It teaches the knowledge layer — the vocabulary, the orientation, the way a boat behaves — so that time on a real boat is spent sailing rather than decoding words. Lessons are still being written, and the course grows as they ship.

Module 1 is free — the whole module, every lesson and quiz in it, with a free account and no card needed. The rest of the course is on a paid plan, set out in full under Plans and billing below.

The marketing site — the blog, the curriculum, and the “Ready to crew?” diagnostic — is open to everyone, no account needed. Lessons need an account, because your progress is saved against it so that it follows you between devices.

Plans and billing

Module 1 stays free forever. Beyond it, there are two plans, both in USD:

• Monthly — $9.99 a month.
• Lifetime — $39.99 once (regular price $49.99), with nothing to renew.

Monthly is a subscription: it renews automatically, at the price you chose, until you cancel it. Lifetime is a single payment for permanent access, so there is nothing to renew and nothing to cancel.

Cancel a subscription any time from the You tab in the app, under “Manage subscription.” That takes you to a page run by our payment processor, where you cancel it yourself — no email needed. Cancelling stops the next renewal. You keep your access for the rest of the period you already paid for, and the plan does not charge you again after that.

Payments are handled by Dodo Payments, who is the merchant of record for every purchase: Dodo is the seller you are actually buying from, not us. Dodo processes your payment details directly — we never see or store your card number — and Dodo is responsible for collecting and remitting any tax that applies to your purchase.

Refunds: Lifetime purchases carry a 14-day money-back guarantee — email us within 14 days of the charge and we will refund it. Monthly subscriptions follow Dodo’s standard refund policy.

We may change prices for new purchases and future renewals, and we will give notice before a change takes effect. A price change is never retroactive: it never changes what you already paid for a period that has already started.

No certification, no affiliation

Crew ranks, signal flags, nautical miles, and streaks are game mechanics. They describe how far you have moved through our own course and nothing else, and they are not an assessment of your competence on a boat.

Do not present a SailStarter lesson, score, or rank to anyone as a qualification — not to a skipper, a charter company, an employer, or an insurer. It is not one.

Safety and your own judgment

SailStarter teaches fundamentals for learning purposes. The course is self-study material, not hands-on instruction: it is not a substitute for time on the water with a qualified instructor, and reading about a boat is not the same as handling one.

What you do on the water is your decision and your responsibility. If you are crewing, the skipper of that boat is in charge, and you should treat their instructions as final.

Rules, licensing, and equipment requirements vary by country and by region within a country, and they change. Our lessons label region-specific facts as region-specific rather than presenting them as universal, because something that is correct in one place can be wrong or unlawful in another. Before you go out, check what applies on the water you are sailing on, with the authority responsible for it.

We write carefully and we correct what we get wrong, but we cannot promise that every sentence in the course is right for your boat, your water, and your day. Sailing carries real risk. Learning the fundamentals ashore is a good way to arrive ready to pay attention; it is not a guarantee of anything once you are aboard.

Your account

You must be at least 16 to create a SailStarter account. That is our own rule, and it is the same rule our privacy policy states. SailStarter is not directed at children.

Signing in works by magic link: you give us an email address, we email you a one-time link, and you follow it. There is no password. Anyone who can read that inbox can sign in as you, so use an address only you can reach and do not forward a sign-in link to anybody.

An account is for one person. Keep yours to yourself, and do not sign in to an account that is not yours.

Progress is saved against the account that earned it. There is no feature for moving progress to another account, and none for merging two accounts.

Acceptable use

The short version: use SailStarter to learn, and leave it working for everyone else. Specifically, do not:

• republish, sell, or redistribute our lessons, quizzes, illustrations, or diagrams — see What we own;
• run automated tools against the service to create accounts, submit quiz answers, or pull the course down faster than a person could read it — search-engine and answer-engine crawlers are welcome, on the terms below;
• try to reach any part of the service, the database, or another person’s account that is not yours to reach;
• attack, overload, or otherwise interfere with the service or its users;
• share your account with someone else, or sign in to an account that is not yours;
• use a display name that impersonates somebody, or that is abusive, hateful, or obscene;
• claim or imply that SailStarter has certified, qualified, endorsed, or trained you;
• break the law of the place you are in while using SailStarter.

If you find a security problem, email us at the address above rather than exploring it further. We would much rather hear from you.

Ending your account

You can stop using SailStarter whenever you like. If you are not on a paid plan, there is nothing to cancel and nothing to arrange.

If you are on a paid plan, deleting your account does not by itself cancel a subscription or refund a purchase — cancel it first from the You tab, under “Manage subscription” (see Plans and billing), then have the account deleted as described below.

To have your account deleted, email us and ask. That removes your sign-in record and everything linked to it; if you also gave us an address for course updates, say so in the same message, because that list is a separate record and deleting an account does not reach it. The steps and the full list of what deletion removes are in the privacy policy. There is no delete button in the app yet, so we do it by hand when you ask.

We can suspend or close an account that is being used in the ways listed under Acceptable use. If we close your account, we will email the address on it and say why. If you think that is a mistake, reply to that email and tell us.

The record of lessons, quizzes, miles, and streaks lives with the account it was earned on. If the account goes, the record goes with it.

What we own

The lessons, the quiz questions and their explanations, the illustrations and diagrams, the writing on this site, and the SailStarter name and logo are our own work, and we own them. The facts of sailing belong to nobody; the way we explain them, draw them, and put them in order is ours, and copyright protects it.

You are welcome to read the lessons, take the quizzes, keep your own notes, and quote a short passage with credit and a link back to the page it came from. Search engines and answer engines are welcome to read us and quote us the same way — our robots.txt allows every crawler, deliberately.

Ask us first for anything beyond that: republishing a lesson or an article in full, using our material to teach or to build something of your own, or selling any of it. The answer is not automatically no.

The open-source software and typefaces SailStarter is built with stay under their own licenses, which we follow.

Your data

What we collect, who else handles it, and how to have it deleted are set out in the privacy policy, which is part of these terms.

In short: we hold your email address, the record of what you have done in the course, and the settings you choose in the app, and our host records ordinary web-server access logs including your IP address. Both sites also run Google Analytics, which sets its own cookies (_ga and _ga_<container-id>) — see the privacy policy’s Cookies and on-device storage and Analytics and advertising sections for what that sends Google. We set no other cookies and run no advertising or ad-personalization tool. Where this summary and the privacy policy differ, the privacy policy is the accurate one.

Availability of the service

SailStarter, including any plan you have paid for, is provided as it is. We do not promise that the site and the app will always be available, that they will be free of faults, or that any particular lesson, feature, or reward will still be there next month.

The course changes. We add lessons, rewrite them when we find something wrong or out of date, and sometimes remove things. A correction can go live without notice: when something in the course turns out to be wrong, we would rather fix it that day than wait.

Some of what the marketing site describes is still being built. As of the date at the top of this page, the iOS and Android apps are in development, and signing in with a social account is not available yet.

We may stop offering SailStarter, or any part of it. If we ever shut the service down, we will email the address on your account first, so that you have the chance to ask us for a copy of what we hold.

Changes to these terms

When these terms change we update the date at the top of this page. If the change matters — a new restriction on how you can use SailStarter, a charge for something that is free today, or a change to what happens to your account — we will say what changed rather than quietly swapping the text.

Using SailStarter after a change means you accept the updated terms. If you would rather not accept them, stop using SailStarter and ask us to delete your account.