Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of Staffcoder (the “Service”), operated by SHASTACK INDIA TECHNOLOGIES (OPC) PRIVATE LIMITED (“Staffcoder”, “we”, “us”), a company incorporated in India under CIN U62010UP2025OPC218177.

By creating an account, subscribing to a paid plan, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy and refund and cancellation policy. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

Staffcoder is an online platform on which you practise software engineering by writing and running code in browser-hosted development environments. The Service includes practice challenges, structured learning paths, competitive contests, AI-assisted features, and progress tracking.

Staffcoder is an educational and practice product. It is not a recruitment service, an employment-decision tool, or a substitute for professional certification or training.

You must be at least 16 years old to create an account. If you are under 18, you may use the Service only with the involvement of a parent or legal guardian who agrees to these Terms on your behalf.

You must be legally capable of entering into a binding contract under the Indian Contract Act, 1872.

You are responsible for the accuracy of the information on your account, for keeping your credentials confidential, and for all activity that occurs under your account. Tell us promptly at support@shastack.com if you believe your account has been accessed without your authorisation.

One account is for one person. Do not share, sell, or transfer your account, and do not create an account on behalf of anyone else without their authorisation.

You may sign in using a third-party identity provider (Google, GitHub, or LinkedIn). Doing so is subject to that provider’s own terms, and we receive only the information described in the Privacy Policy.

You agree not to:

• attempt to access, disrupt, or interfere with the Service’s infrastructure, other users’ sessions, or any system or network connected to the Service;
• use a session environment to mine cryptocurrency, host services, send bulk email, scan or attack third parties, store unlawful material, or perform any activity unrelated to practising on the Service;
• circumvent, or attempt to circumvent, any session limit, usage budget, rate limit, plan entitlement, or content lock;
• automate, scrape, or bulk-download challenges, solutions, learning-path content, or any other material from the Service;
• republish, redistribute, or resell our challenges, reference solutions, or learning-path content, whether or not for commercial gain;
• submit code or content that infringes another person’s rights, contains malware, or is unlawful;
• misrepresent your results, or use the Service to help another person misrepresent theirs;
• impersonate any person or entity, or misstate your affiliation with one.

We may investigate suspected breaches and may suspend or terminate access under clause 13.

The Service provisions containerised development environments for your sessions. These are ephemeral. Unless a feature explicitly states otherwise, everything inside a session environment is discarded when the session ends, and we do not undertake to preserve it.

Session environments are subject to time budgets, concurrency limits, and resource limits that vary by plan. We may apply reasonable technical limits to protect the platform and other users, including where usage is abusive or materially disproportionate.

Do not store anything in a session environment that you cannot afford to lose, and do not treat a session environment as a backup, a hosting service, or a private workspace.

You retain ownership of the code, text, and other material you submit to the Service (“Your Content”).

You grant Staffcoder a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, transmit, execute, evaluate, and display Your Content solely for the purposes of operating the Service for you, evaluating your submissions, providing you with feedback and progress tracking, maintaining platform security and integrity, and complying with law.

This licence ends when you delete Your Content or your account, except to the extent we must retain material to comply with a legal obligation, resolve a dispute, or enforce our agreements, and except for backups that expire on their normal cycle.

We do not claim ownership of Your Content, and we do not use Your Content to train our own machine-learning models. Clause 7 describes what happens when you use AI features.

Some plans and some challenges include AI-assisted features, including an in-editor assistant and, where enabled, an AI interface your own code may call during a challenge.

AI output may be wrong, incomplete, out of date, or misleading. It is a practice aid, not advice. You are responsible for reviewing anything an AI feature produces before relying on it, and for the consequences of code you submit or run.

AI features are subject to a usage budget that varies by plan and resets periodically. When your budget for the period is exhausted, AI features become unavailable until it resets.

AI access is offered on an introductory basis. We may change, limit, meter differently, or withdraw AI features at any time, including for plans that currently include them, and we do not guarantee their continued availability, capacity, or choice of underlying model. Where a change materially reduces what a paid plan provides, clause 15 applies.

Learning paths. Path and module content is added, revised, scheduled, and occasionally withdrawn over time. Where a module is marked as scheduled or forthcoming, any date shown is an estimate and not a commitment. We do not guarantee that any particular path, module, or challenge will be available at a particular time or will remain available.

Contests. Participation in a contest is subject to any rules published for that contest, which form part of these Terms for participants. We may disqualify an entry, exclude a participant, or void a result where we reasonably believe a contest rule has been breached, results have been manipulated, or the integrity of the contest has been compromised. Unless a contest expressly states otherwise, no prize, reward, or consideration is offered.

Certification. Staffcoder does not issue any accredited or professionally recognised certification. Where content is described as “certification-ready” or in similar terms, this means it is intended to help you prepare — it is not a certificate, does not confer a credential, and is not endorsed by any certifying body. Any completion record or badge the Service displays is a record of activity on Staffcoder only.

The Service, and all challenges, reference solutions, learning-path content, environments, designs, text, and software forming part of it, are owned by Staffcoder or its licensors and are protected by intellectual-property law.

Subject to these Terms and to your plan, we grant you a personal, non-transferable, non-sublicensable, revocable licence to access and use the Service for your own learning and practice. No other rights are granted. In particular, you may not use our content to build, train, or populate a competing product or dataset.

Free and paid plans. The Service offers a free plan and one or more paid plans. What each plan includes, and its price, is shown on our pricing page and may change as described below.

Prices and taxes. Prices are shown in the currency applicable to you and are inclusive or exclusive of taxes as indicated at checkout. Indian Goods and Services Tax is charged where applicable, and a GST invoice is issued for each successful payment. Our GSTIN is 09ABPCS4817A1Z8.

Payment processing. Payments are processed by Razorpay. We do not receive or store your full card details. Your payment is also subject to Razorpay’s terms, and to the Reserve Bank of India’s rules on recurring e-mandates, including any pre-debit notification and additional-factor-authentication requirements those rules impose.

Card verification. When you set up a mandate, a small verification charge may be raised against your card and refunded automatically. This is not a charge for the Service.

Plan changes. If you upgrade, the change takes effect immediately and we charge the prorated difference for the remainder of your current period at the time of the change. If you downgrade, the change takes effect at the end of your current period and nothing is charged at the time you request it. A scheduled downgrade can be called off before it takes effect by selecting your current plan again.

UPI mandates. Where your mandate is a UPI mandate, plan changes are not technically possible. To move to a different plan you must cancel and subscribe again; you keep access until the end of the period you have already paid for.

Failed payments. If a renewal payment fails, our payment processor will retry over a short period. If payment is not successfully collected, your subscription may lapse and your access will revert to the free plan.

Price changes. We may change the price of a plan. We will give you at least 30 days’ notice before a changed price applies to your renewal, and you may cancel before it takes effect.

This clause is our refund and cancellation policy. It explains when you can cancel a Staffcoder subscription and when you can get your money back, and it applies to every subscription charge taken by SHASTACK INDIA TECHNOLOGIES (OPC) PRIVATE LIMITED.

Cancelling a subscription

You can cancel at any time from your billing page. There is no cancellation fee and you do not need to contact us.

Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for. You keep full access until that date, and the subscription then ends without renewing. You are not charged again.

A cancellation can be undone. Until the end of the period, your cancellation is only queued — you can reverse it from the billing page and your subscription continues as normal.

If your subscription is on a UPI mandate, plan changes are not possible for technical reasons. To move to a different plan, cancel and subscribe to the plan you want. You keep access until the end of the period you have already paid for.

Refunds

Subscription payments are not refundable. When you pay for a period, that period is yours whether or not you use it, and the subscription renews at the end of it unless you have cancelled.

The free plan is how you decide whether Staffcoder suits you before you pay for it. It has no time limit and needs no card. Downgrades take effect at the end of your current period and are never charged, so there is nothing to refund.

When you set up a payment mandate, a small verification charge may be raised against your card and refunded automatically by the payment processor. This is not a payment for the Service and does not need to be requested.

Where we do refund

We refund in full, whether or not you have raised it with us, where the charge itself was wrong:

• you were charged more than once for the same period;
• you were charged after a cancellation had already taken effect;
• a payment succeeded but the subscription was never activated and we cannot activate it.

A failed payment creates no subscription and takes no money. If your bank shows a pending amount for a failed attempt, it is released by the bank, usually within a few business days.

We also refund where the law requires it, including under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019. Nothing in these Terms limits a statutory right that cannot be excluded.

Outside those cases we are under no obligation to refund. We would still rather be fair than technically correct, so write to us and we will look at it. We may, at our discretion, refund part or all of a payment — for example where a sustained failure on our side prevented you from using what you had paid for, or where we materially reduce what your plan includes part-way through a period. Deciding to do so in one case does not create an entitlement in another.

Where we do not refund

• Renewal payments, including where you did not intend to renew.
• Prorated charges for an upgrade, because the upgraded access begins immediately.
• A period that went unused, in whole or in part.
• A change of mind about a plan you have already paid for.
• Dissatisfaction with content that was available to preview on the free plan.
• Accounts suspended or terminated for a material breach of clause 4.

How refunds are paid

Refunds are made to the original payment method through Razorpay. We cannot refund to a different card, account, or instrument. For a refunded payment against which a GST invoice was issued, we issue a corresponding credit note.

Timelines

If you believe you have been charged wrongly, or you want us to consider a refund at our discretion, write to us from your billing email with the invoice number. We work to these timelines:

Once a refund is approved and sent, the time it takes to appear on your statement is set by your bank rather than by us.

Access to unlocked content

Content unlocked by a paid plan — including reference solutions and premium modules — is available while your plan is active. When your plan ends, access to that content ends. Your own submissions and progress record remain available to you.

We aim to keep the Service available but do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free operation. We may suspend the Service for maintenance, and we will try to give notice where a planned interruption is significant.

We may add, change, or remove features. Where a change materially reduces what your paid plan provides and you are unwilling to accept it, you may cancel and, if a material reduction occurs mid-period, you may ask us for a pro-rata refund of the unused remainder of that period.

You may stop using the Service at any time and may delete your account from your profile settings.

We may suspend or terminate your access, with notice where practicable, if you materially breach these Terms, if your use puts the platform or other users at risk, or if we are required to do so by law. Where we suspend an account for a reason that later proves unfounded, we will restore it and extend any affected paid period.

On termination, clauses 6 (as to licences that survive), 9, 14, 16, 17, and 18 continue to apply.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, the Service is provided “as is” and “as available”. We do not warrant that the Service will meet your requirements, that its content is accurate or complete, that AI output is correct, or that use of the Service will lead to any particular learning, assessment, or employment outcome.

We may update these Terms. Where a change is material — including any change to how we use Your Content, to the AI clause, or to fees and refunds — we will give you notice by email or in the Service before it takes effect, and where the law requires it we will ask you to accept the change. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept it. The “Last updated” date above always reflects the current version.

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 negligence.

If you are on the free plan, the amount referred to in (a) is zero, which is a further reason to read clause 14.

You agree to indemnify Staffcoder against claims, losses, and reasonable costs arising from your breach of these Terms, your misuse of the Service, or your infringement of a third party’s rights — except to the extent the claim arises from our own act or omission.

These Terms are governed by the laws of India. The courts at Gautam Buddha Nagar (Noida), Uttar Pradesh have exclusive jurisdiction over any dispute arising out of or in connection with them, subject to any right you have as a consumer to bring proceedings elsewhere under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019.

In accordance with the Information Technology Act, 2000 and the rules made under it, grievances may be raised with our Grievance Officer at support@shastack.com.

We acknowledge complaints within 48 hours and aim to resolve them within 30 days of receipt. Before starting proceedings under clause 18, please raise the matter with the Grievance Officer. Our registered details are in clause 21.

These Terms, together with the Privacy Policy and the refund and cancellation policy, are the entire agreement between you and us regarding the Service. If any provision is held unenforceable, the rest continues in force. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms; we may assign them in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, on notice to you.

Questions about these Terms go to support@shastack.com.