RaisedHand
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Terms of Service

These are the rules for using RaisedHand. They are the same terms you accept inside the app. Please read them — they are short and written in plain language on purpose.

Last updated: 4 August 2026

Before you publish: replace [YOUR REGISTERED ENTITY NAME] and [YOUR REGISTERED ADDRESS] with the legal name and address of the person or company that operates RaisedHand.

1. Accepting these terms

By creating an account, or by using the RaisedHand app or this website, you agree to these Terms of Service and to our Privacy Policy and Community Guidelines, which form part of these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use RaisedHand.

If you are under 18, you must have your parent or legal guardian read and agree to these terms with you, and they accept them on your behalf.

2. What RaisedHand is

RaisedHand is a peer-to-peer question and answer app for South African high school students in Grades 8–12, built around the CAPS curriculum. Students post academic questions by grade and subject, other students answer them, and the community votes so the most helpful answers rise to the top. The app also includes subject browsing, a personalised feed, communities, direct chat between registered users, bookmarks, notifications, and reputation points, badges and leaderboards.

RaisedHand is free to use and supported by advertising. We may add, change or remove features at any time.

3. Who may use it

  • You must be at least 13 years old.
  • If you are 13 to 17, you need permission from a parent or legal guardian.
  • You must not use RaisedHand if we have previously banned you.
  • You must be able to enter into a binding agreement, or have a parent or guardian do so for you.

4. Your account

You sign in with your phone number and a one-time PIN. You are responsible for:

  • keeping access to that phone number and not sharing your one-time PIN with anyone;
  • everything that happens on your account;
  • giving accurate information — in particular your real grade, because the app uses it to route your questions;
  • telling us at kagiso.thobane.73@gmail.com if you think someone else has got into your account.

One person, one account. Do not impersonate another student, a teacher, or RaisedHand itself.

5. Acceptable use

Our Community Guidelines set out the detail. In summary, you agree not to:

  • bully, harass, threaten, intimidate or humiliate anyone;
  • post hate speech, or attack anyone based on race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, disability, religion or any other protected ground;
  • post sexual content, nudity, or anything that sexualises a minor — this results in an immediate permanent ban and, where the law requires it, a report to the authorities;
  • share personal contact details — yours or anyone else’s — including phone numbers, addresses, email addresses or social media handles;
  • post leaked exam papers, or help anyone cheat on an assessment, test or exam that is currently in progress;
  • post spam, advertising, referral links, tutoring solicitations or repetitive content;
  • post anything unlawful, or anything that infringes someone else’s copyright;
  • scrape, reverse engineer, overload, probe or interfere with the app, our servers or our security;
  • use bots or automated tools to post, vote or manipulate reputation.

6. Your content and the licence you give us

You own what you post. Your questions, answers, comments, chat messages and attachments remain yours.

To run the app, we need your permission to display and move that content around. So by posting, you grant RaisedHand a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, adapt (for example, to resize an image or generate a thumbnail), publish, display and distribute your content within the RaisedHand service and for promoting the service. You confirm that you have the right to grant this licence — that the content is yours, or that you are allowed to post it.

This licence ends when you delete the content or your account, except that:

  • content already shared into a public thread may remain in anonymised form so those threads stay useful to other students, as explained on our Account & Data Deletion page; and
  • copies may persist in routine backups for a short period before they expire.

We may remove or restrict any content that breaks these terms or our guidelines, and we may do so without notice where the content is seriously harmful.

7. Our intellectual property

The RaisedHand name, logo, app design, source code, and everything we create for the service belong to us and our licensors. You may not copy, modify, distribute, sell, or create derivative works from them without our written permission. Using the app does not transfer any of these rights to you.

8. Points, badges and leaderboards

You earn reputation points and badges for helping other students, and you can build a login streak and appear on the leaderboard.

Points and badges have no monetary value. They are recognition inside the app and nothing more. They cannot be bought, sold, redeemed, transferred, exchanged for money, goods or services, or converted into anything of value. They are not a currency, not a prize, and not an entry into any competition.

We may adjust, reset or remove points and badges — for example if they were earned by manipulating votes, using multiple accounts, or spamming answers — and we may change how the scoring works at any time.

9. Advertising

RaisedHand is free because it shows ads through Google AdMob. Because our audience includes minors, all ad requests are tagged as non-personalised and child-directed, and no ads are shown before you complete sign-in. We are not responsible for the products or services advertised, and an ad appearing in the app is not an endorsement by us.

10. Privacy

How we handle your personal information is set out in our Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms. The short version: your phone number is used for sign-in only and is never shown to other users.

11. Disclaimers

RaisedHand is a study aid, not a school

RaisedHand is an educational tool. It is not a substitute for formal schooling, for tutoring, or for the guidance of a qualified teacher. It does not award qualifications and it is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, the Department of Basic Education, Umalusi, any examination body, or any school.

Answers are written by other students and are not verified for accuracy. We do not check, review, endorse or guarantee any answer. Votes and best-answer marks reflect what the community found helpful — they are not a mark of correctness. Always check important work against your textbook, your teacher, or an official CAPS resource. Any decision you make based on content in the app is your own.

The service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we do not warrant that the app will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, or that content in it is accurate, complete or fit for any particular purpose. Some of these exclusions may not apply to you under the Consumer Protection Act, 2008, and nothing in these terms limits any right you have that cannot lawfully be limited.

12. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by South African law:

  • we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, or for loss of data, loss of marks or academic results, or loss of opportunity, arising from your use of RaisedHand;
  • we are not liable for content posted by other users, for anything you do in reliance on that content, or for the conduct of other users towards you, whether in a public thread or in direct chat;
  • we are not liable for third-party services the app depends on, including outages at Supabase, Google Firebase or Google AdMob;
  • where liability cannot be excluded, our total liability to you is limited to ZAR 1 000, reflecting that RaisedHand is provided to you free of charge.

Nothing here excludes liability for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

13. Suspension and termination

You can leave at any time. Delete your account at Profile → Settings → Delete Account, or follow the steps on our Account & Data Deletion page.

We may suspend or terminate your account if you break these terms or our Community Guidelines, if your account is used to harm other users, or if we are required to by law. Where it is reasonable to do so we will tell you why and give you a way to respond; for serious harm — particularly anything involving the sexualisation of a minor — we act immediately and permanently.

Sections 6 (the licence, as limited there), 7, 11, 12 and 15 survive termination.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. We will change the “Last updated” date at the top of this page, and for significant changes we will notify you in the app before they take effect. If you keep using RaisedHand after that, you accept the updated terms. If you do not accept them, please delete your account.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa. You and we agree to the non-exclusive jurisdiction of the South African courts. If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest stays in force.

16. Contact