Terms & Conditions

KeyMentor is operated by KeyMentor Advisory Corporation, a nonprofit organization based at 1 Ashley Avenue, Middletown, NY 10940 (“KeyMentor”, “we”, “us”). These Terms & Conditions are the agreement between you and us for the KeyMentor website, the mentoring program, the community, and the college-planning tools in your account — together, the “Service”.

By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you don't agree with them, please don't use KeyMentor.

• You must be at least 13 years old. KeyMentor is built for high-school students, and we do not knowingly allow anyone under 13 to create an account.
• If you are under 18, you need permission from a parent or legal guardian to use the Service, and they agree to these terms with you.
• Mentors must be 18 or older and complete our onboarding before being matched with a student.
• One account per person. Keep the information on it accurate — your score and your recommendations are only as good as what you enter.

If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 13, we will delete it and the information attached to it. A parent or guardian can also write to us at contact@keymentor.org to have an account removed.

KeyMentor connects high-school students with near-peer mentors — college students and recent graduates who volunteer their time — through messaging, 1-on-1 sessions you arrange in the app and join over a meeting link the mentor provides, a student community, and in-person events.

Your account also includes free college-planning tools: a rating that estimates where a college applicant with your profile stands, and a ranked list of the moves that would raise it. That rating is private to you. We never show it to a college, a recruiter, or an admissions office.

It is not:

• An admissions decision, a prediction of one, or any kind of guarantee. No college has reviewed, endorsed, or agreed to anything shown in KeyMentor, and your score has no standing with any admissions office.
• Professional advice. Nothing on KeyMentor is legal, financial, medical, or licensed counseling advice. For decisions with real consequences — course selection, financial aid, immigration status — confirm with your school counselor or a qualified professional.
• An emergency or crisis service. If you or someone else is in danger, contact your local emergency number or a crisis line. In the U.S. you can call or text 988.
• A paid service. KeyMentor is free for students. If anyone asks you to pay for access, mentoring, or a better score, it did not come from us — please report it.

• You're responsible for what happens under your account, so keep your sign-in details to yourself and don't let anyone else use it.
• Tell us right away if you think someone else has gotten into your account.
• You can delete your account at any time from your profile, or by emailing us. Deleting it removes your saved profile and reports from our database, as described in the Privacy Policy.

Mentors are volunteers. They are not our employees or agents, they do not speak for KeyMentor or for any college, and they are sharing their own experience — not professional guidance. We do our best to onboard mentors carefully, but we can't guarantee the accuracy of anything an individual mentor tells you.

• Keep mentoring conversations on KeyMentor. It's how our safety and moderation tools can actually protect you.
• Don't exchange personal contact details, addresses, or financial information with a mentor, and never send money to one. No mentor should ever ask.
• No money changes hands in mentoring, in either direction. Mentors may not charge students, solicit clients, or recruit for a paid service.
• Students start mentor conversations, not the other way round. If a message makes you uncomfortable, use the Report action — the person reported is never told who reported them.

Meeting times, session length, and how often you meet are worked out between you and your mentor. We don't promise a specific mentor, a specific number of sessions, or that a match will always be available.

In the community you post under a handle, not your real name. The community guidelines are part of these terms, and they're shown to you before you claim a handle. In short: stay pseudonymous, be respectful, and report things rather than retaliating.

Our moderators can remove a post or comment, temporarily stop an account from posting, or suspend an account outright for repeated or serious violations. When a direct message is reported, admins may review the surrounding messages in that thread, so a report can be judged in context.

Your content stays yours. By posting it to KeyMentor, you give us permission to store, display, and share it within the Service so it can do what you intended — show your post to the community, deliver your message to your mentor, render the card you chose to share.

Only post things you have the right to post, and don't post other people's personal information. We may remove content that breaks these terms, and we may keep records of removed content where we need them for safety and moderation.

If you send us feedback or an idea, we can use it to improve KeyMentor without owing you anything for it.

• Harass, bully, threaten, or target anyone, or post hateful, sexual, or violent content.
• Pretend to be someone else — another student, a mentor, a school, or KeyMentor itself.
• Use KeyMentor to advertise, recruit, or sell anything, including admissions consulting.
• Scrape the site, hammer our APIs, or use bots and automated tools against the Service.
• Probe, break, or work around our security, rate limits, or moderation systems, or try to reach data that isn't yours.
• Deliberately falsify your profile to game the score or the leaderboard, or make up credentials.
• Do anything illegal, or anything that puts another student at risk.

Donations are processed by our payment partner, Givebutter, on their systems and under their terms. We never see or store your card details. Gifts are voluntary, and you receive nothing in exchange for one — KeyMentor is free either way, and giving has no effect on a student's score, matching, or standing.

Donations are generally non-refundable. If a gift was made by mistake or in the wrong amount, email contact@keymentor.org and we'll work it out. Questions about a receipt, or about how your gift is used, are welcome at the same address.

What we collect, where it lives, who we share it with, and how to have it deleted are all covered in the Privacy Policy. It's written in plain language and it's worth reading — especially the parts about what stays on your own device and what doesn't.

KeyMentor runs on a small number of outside providers: Supabase (database and sign-in), Google (optional sign-in), OpenRouter (the gateway to the AI model that writes explanations), Vercel (hosting), and Givebutter (donations). Using KeyMentor means those providers handle the data described in the Privacy Policy, under their own terms. We're not responsible for outages or changes on their side, and links from KeyMentor to other sites aren't endorsements of them.

Your score and your ranked next moves are produced by a deterministic engine: the same inputs always produce the same result, and every recommendation can be traced back to a rule. The AI in KeyMentor only puts an already-decided result into plain language. It never picks your recommendations, changes your score, or adds facts of its own.

Even so, explanations can be wrong or out of date, and our data about colleges, deadlines, and requirements can be too. Check anything that matters — a deadline, a course requirement, a policy — against the college's own website before you act on it.

KeyMentor is early and actively being built. Features can change, move, or be removed, and we may limit or pause parts of the Service while we work on them. We don't promise the site will always be available or error-free, and we may run tests and try new things with a small group of users first.

You can stop using KeyMentor and delete your account whenever you like.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms or the community guidelines, or where we believe it's necessary to protect another student. Where we reasonably can, we'll tell you why. If you believe we got it wrong, write to us — we'll take another look.

The KeyMentor name, logo, site, copy, and the scoring engine behind it belong to us. You're welcome to use KeyMentor and to share your own score card. Please don't copy the site, present our materials as your own, or use our name or logo in a way that suggests we endorse or are affiliated with something we aren't.

KeyMentor is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. We don't warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, secure, or error-free, that the information in it is accurate or complete, or that using it will lead to any particular academic or admissions outcome.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, KeyMentor and its directors, volunteers, and staff are not liable for indirect, incidental, consequential, or punitive damages, or for lost opportunities, arising out of your use of the Service — including anything a mentor or another user says or does, and including a decision you make based on your score.

Because the Service is free, our total liability to you for any claim relating to it is limited to one hundred U.S. dollars ($100). Some places don't allow these limits, and where that's the case they don't apply to you.

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New York, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. Any dispute will be brought in the state or federal courts located in Orange County, New York, and we both agree to those courts.

Before that, please come to us first: almost everything is faster to fix with an email than a filing.

If we change these terms, we'll update this page and the “last updated” date at the top. If a change is significant, we'll make it clear before it takes effect. Continuing to use KeyMentor after a change means you accept the updated terms.

Questions about these terms, a report to make, or something that doesn't look right? Email contact@keymentor.org, or use the contact form. We read everything.

KeyMentor Advisory Corporation · 1 Ashley Avenue, Middletown, NY 10940