Student Retainer — Terms of Service
Effective date: 31 August 2026
Last updated: 3 September 2026
These terms cover the free Student Retention Scan. They are written in plain English deliberately — if you have to read them twice to work out what you have agreed to, they are not doing their job.
By uploading your exports, you agree to these terms, to our Privacy Notice, and to our Data Processing Agreement, which governs your students' personal information and forms part of these terms.
1. Who this agreement is between
You, the course creator, and Student Retainer — a service of ABB Residential Limited (New Zealand company number 9297136), operated by Alex Bellis-Boag in New Zealand.
You need to be at least 18 and have the authority to agree on behalf of your business.
2. What the service is
You send us two Thinkific Analytics exports and answer some questions about your courses. We read them, apply the same rules to every student, and email you a report listing up to 20 students in detail who may be worth contacting, with what was observed about each, a suggested next step, and a draft message.
It is advice, not action. We never contact your students. The report suggests; you decide, and you send anything that gets sent.
It is free. There is no charge for this scan, no account, no subscription, and no card details. If we later offer something paid, that will be a separate agreement you choose to enter — nothing here signs you up for it.
3. What you are telling us when you upload
By uploading, you confirm that:
- You have the legal right to share this data with us, and sharing it does not break any law or any promise you have made to your students.
- The files are the original exports from Thinkific, not edited, re-saved or assembled by hand.
- Your answers about your courses — which ones drip-release lessons, offer free previews, sit behind prerequisites, or use SCORM — are accurate and complete as far as you know.
- The courses in the export do not have students under 18, and none of them cover a subject where being enrolled would itself reveal something private about a person. We cannot accept those, as explained in the Privacy Notice.
- You will tell us if any of your students are in the EU or the UK. The exports do not reliably say where your students live and we do not check, but nothing about how their data is protected depends on this — section 6 of the Data Processing Agreement sets out what covers each leg.
That third point matters more than it looks. The exports genuinely cannot show us that a course drips lessons, gates content, or runs on SCORM. A student who has finished everything available to them looks identical to a student who stopped. If your answers are wrong or incomplete, the report will name the wrong people, and there is nothing at our end that can detect it. Getting this right is the single most useful thing you can do for the quality of your report.
4. What we do not promise
No guaranteed outcome. The report is a set of observations and suggestions. We do not promise it will reduce dropouts, increase completions, or make you money, and nothing in it should be read as a promise about any individual student.
The report is only as good as the export. Thinkific refreshes its reporting data once a day, so your export is up to a day old before you even download it. If a filter was left switched on, the file may be incomplete in ways that still look valid.
Unpublished lessons move the numbers. If a course has draft lessons that are not yet published, neither export can see them. The moment you publish them, every enrolled student's completion percentage drops — with no warning and no signal in the data. That can change which students a future report surfaces. It is worth knowing before you compare one week to the next.
We depend on Thinkific. If they change their export format or their data is wrong, our report will be affected. We have no control over that and no relationship with them.
This is early software. We are running this scan with a small number of creators precisely to find out where it gets things wrong. Expect rough edges, and please tell us about them.
5. Your data and your students' data
Our Privacy Notice sets out what we collect, where it goes, and how long we keep it. In summary: for your own details we are the controller; for your students' details we act on your behalf as your processor, and you remain responsible for them.
Section 3 of that notice lists what is actually inside the two exports, category by category. You send us the complete dashboard exports because Thinkific offers no smaller version, so we receive more than our analysis reads. That notice says which files we open and which we do not.
We do not put your data, or your students' data, into any AI system. The analysis is ordinary software following fixed rules, and the person who reviews your report reads it himself. This is a binding commitment in the Data Processing Agreement, and we will amend that agreement and tell you before it ever changes.
We never sell your data or your students' data, we never share it for any purpose other than producing your report, nothing you send us is used to train a model, and your finished report is sent only to you.
We may use anonymous, aggregated patterns — how often a particular situation occurs across all reports — to improve how the analysis works. Nothing in that can identify anyone.
6. Who owns what
Your report is yours. Use it, share it inside your business, act on it however you like.
How the report is produced is ours. The rules, the wording, the analysis and the software behind it stay ours. Please don't copy the report's structure to build a competing product, resell it, or pass it off as your own analysis.
Your data stays yours throughout. We hold a copy only for as long as the Privacy Notice says, and only to produce your report.
7. Feedback
We will probably ask what you thought — whether the students it surfaced were worth your time, and what it got wrong. That is the point of running this scan.
Giving feedback is optional. If you do give it, we can use it to improve the product without owing you anything for it. We will not quote you publicly or name your business without asking you first.
8. Ending it
You can stop at any time. Email us and we will delete your data.
There is one clock, and it is the same in all three documents. Any deletion request you make is completed within two business days and confirmed in writing. If you simply stop without asking us for anything, everything we still hold is deleted within 14 days. The Privacy Notice and the Data Processing Agreement say the same, and the Data Processing Agreement also explains the two copies at Tally and Google that take a little longer to fall away.
We can decline or stop too — if the files aren't usable, if the courses fall into the categories we cannot accept, or if we simply can't deliver. If that happens we will tell you why rather than go quiet.
9. Liability
The scan is free, and we ask you to accept a matching limit on what we owe you if something goes wrong.
We are not liable for lost profit, lost revenue, lost business, or any indirect loss arising from the report or from anything you do because of it. Our total liability to you for any claim, however it arises, is limited to NZ$100.
Nothing here limits any right you have under consumer law that cannot legally be excluded — including, for creators in Australia, rights under the Australian Consumer Law, and for creators in New Zealand, rights under the Consumer Guarantees Act that apply to you.
If a claim is made against us because of something you did — because you did not have the right to share your students' data, or because you broke a privacy law — you agree to cover the reasonable cost of dealing with it.
10. Changes
We may update these terms as the product develops. If we make a significant change, we will email anyone whose data we still hold. The date at the top always tells you which version you are reading.
11. Law and disputes
These terms are governed by New Zealand law.
If something goes wrong, email us first and we will genuinely try to sort it out. If we cannot, the courts of New Zealand have jurisdiction.
12. Contact
alex@studentretainer.com