The short version
- Waraq reviews your manuscript before you submit it. It is an aid, not a co-author, not peer review, and not a promise of acceptance. Findings can be wrong; you remain responsible for what you submit.
- Upload only what you have the right to upload, with your co-authors' agreement. Never upload work you hold in confidence as a reviewer, editor or examiner.
- You keep every right to your manuscript. We take only the narrow licence needed to process it, and we never train AI on it.
- Paid plans are billed by Polar as merchant of record and renew until cancelled. All purchases are final: no refunds once a review has started or the billing period has begun. Cancel any time and keep access to the end of the period. A review that fails for our reasons is re-run or credited.
- Our liability is capped at what you paid us in the last 12 months. Saudi law applies and disputes go to arbitration, except where your consumer law says otherwise. We give 14 days' notice before material changes.
1. Agreement
These Terms of Service ("Terms") are a contract between you and Alurood Alilmiyya Company for Education, a limited liability company registered in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (Commercial Registration 7037878365) at 4309 King Abdullah Al Saud Road, Al Raed, Riyadh ("Waraq", "we", "us"). They govern your use of waraq.io, app.waraq.io, our API and emails (the "Service"). By creating an account, uploading a manuscript or paying for a plan, you accept these Terms and our Privacy Policy (/legal/privacy). If you do not agree, do not use the Service.
You must be at least 18 and able to enter a binding contract. If you use the Service for a university, lab or company, you confirm you have authority to bind it, and "you" includes that organisation.
2. What the Service is (and is not)
You upload a manuscript in .docx format. We run deterministic checks (structure, citations, statistics, reporting standards, journal guidelines, retractions) and AI-assisted passes, and return findings, a score, a reviewed .docx with tracked changes and comments, and reports.
A pre-submission aid, not a referee, editor or ghostwriter. Waraq helps you find problems before a journal does. It does not write your paper, replace peer review, or decide what is true. You remain the author and are responsible for every word you submit, including any suggested edit you accept.
Findings can be wrong. Outputs come from language models and rule engines. They may miss real problems, flag non-problems, or state something inaccurate with confidence. Read every finding critically, and never treat statistical, ethical, legal or medical observations as professional advice.
No outcome is promised. A high score does not mean a journal will accept your paper, and a low score does not mean it will not. Journal guidelines and reference metadata come from third-party sources and may be outdated; always confirm against the journal's current author instructions.
3. Accounts
You sign in with a one-time code sent to your email. Keep that email account secure; anything done through your session is your responsibility until you tell us it was compromised. One person per account; do not share accounts or create accounts to evade quotas. Anonymous trial sessions are deleted after 30 days of inactivity.
4. Your manuscript: rights, licence and confidentiality
You own it. You retain all rights in your manuscript, your data and the questionnaire context you provide ("Your Content").
Limited licence to us. You grant Waraq a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, copy, extract, analyse, transmit to our sub-processors and create derivative outputs from Your Content solely to provide the Service, keep it secure, and audit review quality as described in the Privacy Policy. The licence ends when you delete the content.
No AI training. We will never use Your Content, or the outputs derived from it, to train, fine-tune, distil or evaluate any machine-learning model, ours or a third party's. We route Your Content only to providers whose Data Processing Addenda and API terms prohibit training on it; if a provider cannot give that assurance, we stop sending Your Content to it.
Outputs are yours. You may use, edit, publish and share the findings, reviewed files and reports we produce for you, for any purpose, without attribution. We may use aggregated, non-identifying statistics (for example how often a rule fires) that contain no manuscript text.
Confidentiality. We treat Your Content as confidential unpublished research and disclose it only to the sub-processors needed to run the Service, to staff bound by confidentiality for the purposes in the Privacy Policy, or where law compels us. Uploading to Waraq is not publication. You may opt out of quality-audit reads by emailing privacy@waraq.io.
5. Your responsibilities and academic integrity
You represent and warrant that:
- You are an author of the manuscript or have written authorisation from the rights holder, and, where there are co-authors, you have their consent or your institution's and journal's policies do not require it.
- You will not upload another person's unpublished work obtained as a peer reviewer, editor, supervisor, examiner or otherwise in confidence. Doing so breaches the confidentiality of peer review and is a serious violation of these Terms.
- Your manuscript does not contain third-party personal data (for example identifiable patient data) unless you have the lawful right to share it with us and our processors; you will anonymise such data where possible.
- You will follow your target journal's and institution's rules on disclosing AI-assisted tools. Checking and disclosing is your responsibility.
- You will not present Waraq's outputs as independent peer review or as editorial, statistical or ethics approval, and you will use the Service to improve your own work, not to fabricate, plagiarise or misrepresent research.
6. Prohibited uses
You must not: upload content that is unlawful, infringing or malicious, or designed to attack the Service or its models (for example prompt injection); reverse engineer or extract the rules, prompts or scoring logic of the Service; scrape or access the Service by automated means other than our documented API; resell the Service or use our outputs to build a competing service; circumvent quotas, rate limits or security measures, including with multiple accounts; or use the Service in violation of sanctions laws. We may suspend or terminate accounts that breach this Section.
7. Plans, quotas and fair use
Free tier. New accounts may run one free review per month. Every finding is visible; the reviewed file carries a "free preview" watermark, and exports and re-reviews are paid features.
Paid plans. Pro, Pro+ and Ultra plans are sold by the number of papers you can review per billing period (weekly, monthly or 3-monthly). Current quotas and prices are shown at /pricing and at checkout. Re-running a review on the same document does not consume quota on paid plans. Unused quota does not roll over. Ultra plans route to a higher-capability model tier where available.
Fair use. Unusually large documents or abusive re-runs may be slowed or declined. We may change prices, quotas and plan names with at least 14 days' notice by email; price changes apply from your next renewal.
8. Payment, cancellation and refunds
Merchant of record. Payments are processed by Polar Software Inc. ("Polar") as merchant of record: Polar sells you the subscription, collects payment, remits taxes, issues invoices and handles chargebacks under its own terms, and may refund a transaction under those terms (for example to prevent a chargeback). We never receive or store your card details.
Automatic renewal. Subscriptions renew at the end of each period (week, month or 3 months) until cancelled. By subscribing you authorise Polar to charge the recurring price to your payment method. We send a reminder email before renewal. If a renewal fails, Polar may retry; if payment is not received, we may downgrade you to the free tier without deleting your data. Prices exclude VAT or sales tax unless stated; Polar adds tax where required.
Cancellation. Cancel any time from the Billing page. Your plan stays active until the end of the paid period and is not renewed after that. We may offer a one-time 25% retention discount when you cancel; accepting it applies to the next renewal of that subscription only.
Refunds. All purchases are final and non-refundable once a review has started or the billing period has begun. By paying, you expressly request that we start providing the Service immediately and acknowledge that you lose any statutory right of withdrawal once a review has started. You can cancel at any time and keep access until the end of the paid period; we do not refund the unused part of a period. The only exceptions are: (a) where the law of your country of residence gives you a refund, withdrawal or conformity right that cannot be excluded by contract, which we honour; and (b) a review that fails for reasons on our side and that we cannot complete, which we re-run without quota consumption or credit to your account, not refund. Where a refund is due under (a), Polar issues it to the original payment method, usually within 5 to 10 business days.
9. Availability, changes and data
The Service is provided without an uptime guarantee. Processing depends on third-party model providers and may be delayed or fail; a failed review can be re-run without quota consumption. We may change features, rules, models and scoring methods at any time; scores are not comparable across major versions. We may discontinue the Service with at least 30 days' notice and will let you export your data first.
Retention periods and deletion rights are set out in the Privacy Policy and the Data Processing Summary (/legal/data-processing). You can delete any paper or your whole account yourself at any time.
10. Our intellectual property and third parties
The Service, including its software, rule library, prompts, scoring methodology, design, trademarks (including "Waraq" and the Waraq mark) and documentation, is owned by Waraq or its licensors. Except for the rights to your own outputs in Section 4, these Terms grant you no rights in the Service. Feedback you send us may be used without obligation.
The Service depends on third parties (model providers via OpenRouter and Cloudflare AI Gateway, Cloudflare, Polar, Resend, PostHog, Crossref, OpenAlex). We are not responsible for their availability or acts, but we choose them with care and bind them by contract as described in the Privacy Policy.
11. Copyright and confidentiality complaints
If you believe content processed through the Service infringes your copyright or was uploaded in breach of confidence, email privacy@waraq.io (or support@waraq.io) with your contact details, the work concerned, the basis of your claim, and a good-faith statement that you are entitled to act. We will investigate, and may remove content and suspend the account concerned.
12. Disclaimer of warranties
The Service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent permitted by law, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy and non-infringement. We do not warrant that findings are correct or complete, that the Service will be uninterrupted, or that any manuscript will be accepted anywhere.
13. Limitation of liability
To the fullest extent permitted by law: (1) Waraq is not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for loss of profits, revenue, data, goodwill, reputation, academic standing, or missed submission deadlines, even if advised of the possibility. (2) Waraq's total liability for all claims arising out of or relating to the Service is limited to the amounts you paid us for the Service in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim; if you paid nothing in that period, our liability is limited to USD 50. (3) Nothing in these Terms excludes liability for fraud, wilful misconduct, gross negligence, death or personal injury caused by negligence, or any liability that cannot be excluded by law. Consumers keep any non-waivable statutory rights in their country of residence.
14. Indemnity
You will indemnify Waraq, its founder, staff and contractors against claims, damages and reasonable costs (including legal fees) arising from your breach of Sections 4, 5 or 6, from Your Content (including claims that you lacked the right to upload it), or from your violation of law or of a journal's or institution's rules.
15. Suspension and termination
You may close your account at any time from the app. We may suspend or terminate your access with notice if you materially breach these Terms, if required by law, or after long inactivity. On termination your licence to use the Service ends and we delete your data as described in the Privacy Policy. Sections 4 (no AI training, outputs, confidentiality), 10 and 12 to 17 survive termination.
16. Governing law and disputes
Governing law. These Terms are governed by the laws of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, without regard to conflict-of-law rules.
Informal resolution first. Before starting formal proceedings, email support@waraq.io describing the dispute. We will try in good faith to resolve it within 30 days.
Arbitration. Any dispute not resolved informally will be finally settled by arbitration administered by the Saudi Center for Commercial Arbitration (SCCA) under its Arbitration Rules, by a sole arbitrator, seated in Riyadh, conducted in English (or Arabic if both parties agree). The award is final and binding. Either party may seek interim relief from a competent court.
Consumer carve-out. If you are a consumer in a jurisdiction whose law gives you the right to bring claims in your local courts or before a local consumer body, or to be sued only there, nothing in this Section removes that right.
Individual claims. To the extent permitted by law, disputes are resolved individually and not as a class, collective or representative action.
17. General
Entire agreement. These Terms, the Privacy Policy and the Data Processing Summary are the whole agreement between you and Waraq about the Service. Severability. If any provision is unenforceable, the rest remains in force. Assignment. You may not assign these Terms; we may assign them to a successor with notice to you. Force majeure. Neither party is liable for delay caused by events beyond its reasonable control, including outages at model providers. Notices. By email to your account address or in the app; to us at support@waraq.io. Language. These Terms are drafted in English; the Arabic translation is provided for convenience and the English version prevails in case of conflict, unless mandatory law provides otherwise.
18. Changes to these Terms
We may update these Terms. For material changes we will give at least 14 days' notice by email. If you keep using the Service after the effective date, the new Terms apply; if you do not agree, close your account before then and, if the change materially reduces what you paid for, ask support@waraq.io for a credit for the remaining period.
19. Contact
Alurood Alilmiyya Company for Education (CR 7037878365), 4309 King Abdullah Al Saud Road, Al Raed, Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Support: support@waraq.io · Legal and privacy notices: privacy@waraq.io (or support@waraq.io)