Last updated 17 August 2026 · In effect from 6 August 2026
These terms set out what you get when you study with English Certificate Preparation, what we promise, and what we do not. We have tried to write them in plain English rather than in legal fog.
The short version: study with our material yourself as much as you like, but do not resell it; everything we sell is a one-off purchase that simply expires — nothing renews and there is nothing to cancel; our marks are a good estimate and not an official result; we cannot promise you will pass; and if we ever have to shut the service down, you get the unused part of your money back.
English Certificate Preparation is operated by the sole trader identified below (“we”, “us”, “our”). These terms are the agreement between you and us about the service — your account, the study material, and how both may be used.
The payment side of a purchase works differently: purchases are sold through Stripe as the merchant of record, which means Stripe is the legal seller of the payment transaction itself. What that means for you is set out in the clause on plans, prices and payment. We remain responsible to you for the service the purchase unlocks.
Trader details
The legal name, business ID and registered address of the trader are published here before sales open. Until then, the quickest way to reach a person is the support form.
By creating an account, buying access, or otherwise using English Certificate Preparation, you confirm that you have read and accept these terms. If you do not accept them, please do not use the service.
These terms are provided in English only. Please make sure you understand them before you buy. If anything is unclear, contact us through our support form and we will explain it before you commit.
To buy access you must be at least 18 years old and legally able to enter into a contract. If you are under 18, a parent or guardian must make the purchase and hold the account.
To use an account you must be at least 15 years old. The service is designed for exam candidates and is not intended for younger children. If we learn that an account belongs to someone under 15, we will close it and delete the associated personal data.
You are responsible for keeping your password confidential and for everything done through your account. Tell us immediately if you think someone else has access to it.
English Certificate Preparation provides online practice material for English language examinations: practice exercises, full practice papers, recorded listening material, model answers, written explanations, progress tracking, and automated marking of Writing and Speaking answers.
Some material is free. The rest requires paid access, as described on our pricing page.
Everything we sell is a one-off purchase of access for a fixed period — for example five days, three months or six months. There are no subscriptions: nothing renews automatically, we never store an authority to charge you again, and there is nothing you need to cancel to avoid a future charge. Which options exist, what they include, and what they cost is shown on the pricing page and again at checkout before you pay.
Prices are shown including any applicable VAT. The final amount, the currency and the length of the access period are confirmed on the checkout page before you are asked to pay. Nothing is charged before you confirm.
Checkout is operated by Stripe, acting as the merchant of record: Stripe is the legal seller of the payment transaction, and by paying you also accept Stripe’s own consumer terms for that transaction. In practice this means:
Your access begins when Stripe confirms to us that your payment has settled — usually within seconds, occasionally longer for delayed payment methods such as bank transfers. The contract for the access period is concluded at that moment. If a payment later fails or is reversed, the access it paid for ends.
We may change our prices at any time. A change never affects access you have already paid for — it only applies to purchases made after the new price is published.
Paid access lasts for the fixed period stated when you bought it, and then simply ends. Nothing further is charged, and no action is needed from you. Your account, your history and the free material remain available after a paid period expires.
If you buy again while a period is still running, the new period starts when the current one ends, so days you have paid for are never lost or overlapped. If you hold two different plans at once, you get the more generous of the two for as long as both run.
As a consumer buying at a distance, you normally have 14 days to withdraw from the contract without giving any reason and receive your money back.
For digital content supplied immediately, the law allows you to give up that right in exchange for instant access — but only with your express consent and your acknowledgement that the right is lost. That consent is collected during checkout, which is operated by Stripe as merchant of record: by completing the purchase you request that the paid material is made available to you immediately, and you acknowledge that your 14-day right of withdrawal ends once access is granted.
If that consent was not properly put to you at checkout, the 14-day right survives — and we will honour it: tell us within 14 days of the purchase and you will receive a full refund.
Full details, including how to send a withdrawal notice, are in our Refund & Cancellation Policy, which forms part of these terms.
Your access is personal, non-exclusive and non-transferable. You may use our material to study, including printing exercises for your own use.
You may not:
We may suspend or close an account that breaches this clause. Where the breach is serious — for example reselling our material or sharing an account widely — we may do so immediately and without refunding the remainder of the period. In every other case, the refund rules in the clause on ending the agreement apply.
If you are a teacher or a school and want to use our material with students, write to us. We would rather licence it to you properly than argue about it.
All exercises, texts, audio recordings, explanations, model answers, artwork, software and branding on English Certificate Preparation are owned by us or licensed to us, and are protected by copyright. Paying for access buys you a licence to study with the material, not ownership of it. The licence lasts as long as your access does.
Your answers, essays and speaking transcripts remain yours. To run the service we need a limited licence to store your submissions, display them back to you, and send them for automated marking as described in the clause on automated marking and in our Privacy Policy. That licence exists only to provide the service to you, and ends when you delete the content or your account.
We do not use your submissions to train AI models, and we do not publish them or sell them.
English Certificate Preparation is an independent study resource. We are not affiliated with, authorised by, endorsed by or in any way officially connected with Cambridge University Press & Assessment. “B2 First”, “C1 Advanced”, “FCE”, “CAE” and “Cambridge English” are trademarks of their respective owners and are used here only to describe the examinations our practice material prepares you for.
If you believe something on English Certificate Preparation infringes your rights, contact us through our support form with enough detail to identify the material, and we will investigate promptly.
Writing and Speaking answers are marked automatically using artificial intelligence, applying the published assessment scales for the examination. The text of your answer is sent to our AI provider for that purpose. Where you use dictation, your speech is converted to text by the speech-recognition feature built into your browser — how that works, and who operates it, is explained in our Privacy Policy. We send only the resulting text for marking, never audio.
An automated mark is an informed estimate, not an official result. It can differ from the mark a human examiner would award, in either direction. Only the official examining body can award you a real grade. Do not use our marks as the sole basis for deciding whether to enter for an examination, and do not treat them as a prediction of your result.
Plans that include AI marking come with a fair-use allowance of 20 marked pieces per rolling 30 days, and at most 6 in any 24 hours. The same allowance is stated on the pricing page. A typical candidate never reaches it; it exists to stop automated abuse.
Automated marking depends on services outside our control and may be temporarily unavailable, rate-limited, or withdrawn.
We work to keep English Certificate Preparation available and want it to work well for you. But we provide the service on a reasonable-efforts basis and we do not guarantee any level of uptime. We give no service level agreement, and no credit or refund is due for interruptions that are brief, occasional, or outside our control.
The service may be unavailable or reduced because of:
We may add, change, or remove features, and we may retire individual exercises or replace them with better ones. Where a change would substantially and negatively affect access you have already paid for, we will tell you in advance and you may end the contract and receive a refund of the unused portion, as set out in the clause on ending the agreement.
Nothing in this clause affects your statutory rights if the digital content we supply is defective — see the clause on faulty content.
You can stop using the service at any time. Because nothing renews, there is never a future charge you need to act to avoid — a paid period simply runs out on its own.
You can delete your account yourself on the Access & account page, or ask us through our support form, from the email address on the account, and we will do it promptly. Deleting your account is immediate and permanent, and ends your access at once, including any period you have paid for — so if you still have paid time left, consider simply letting it run out first.
Choosing to leave early does not by itself entitle you to money back. The situations in which we do refund are set out in our Refund & Cancellation Policy.
We may suspend or end your access if you seriously or repeatedly breach these terms, if we are required to by law, or if your payment is reversed and not settled. Except in the case of serious breach of the acceptable use rules, we will refund the unused part of anything you have paid.
We may decide at any time to stop offering the service. If we do:
We say this plainly because it is the law and because it is right: money you have paid for access you never received belongs to you, and no wording in these terms could change that.
We are responsible for supplying digital content that matches its description and works as it reasonably should. Because we supply access continuously over a period, that responsibility runs for the whole of your access period.
If something is defective — for example an exercise with a wrong answer key, audio that will not play, or a feature that stops working — tell us through our support form. We will fix it within a reasonable time and at no cost to you. If we cannot fix it, or do not fix it within a reasonable time, you are entitled to a proportionate reduction in price or, where the defect is significant, to end the contract and receive a refund for the affected period.
We aim to reply to any complaint within 14 days and will resolve it no later than 30 days after you raise it, as required by law.
Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, for intentional harm or gross negligence, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited. Your statutory rights as a consumer are unaffected by this clause.
Subject to that:
If you use the service for business purposes rather than as a consumer, the consumer protections in these terms do not apply to you, and our liability to you is limited to the amount you paid us.
Please come to us first — most problems are quicker to fix directly. Contact us through our support form describing what happened and what you would like us to do. For questions about the payment itself — the charge on your statement, your receipt or invoice — Stripe, as merchant of record, also provides transaction support.
If we cannot resolve it between us, you have the right to use out-of-court dispute resolution. The competent body is the Czech Trade Inspection Authority (Česká obchodní inspekce), Štěpánská 796/44, 110 00 Prague 1, Czech Republic — www.coi.cz, online form at adr.coi.cz. The procedure is free of charge for you.
If you live in another EU country, the consumer body in your own country can also help you; the European Consumer Centre network (ECC Czech Republic) handles cross-border cases.
Using any of these routes is your choice and does not stop you from going to court.
We may update these terms — for example when we add a feature or when the law changes. The version in force is always the one published on this page, with the date at the top.
If a change materially affects your rights or obligations, we will tell you by email at least 30 days before it takes effect. If you do not accept the change, tell us before that date: we will end the contract and refund the unused portion of any access period you have already paid for. Continuing to use the service after the change takes effect means you accept it.
Changes never apply retroactively to a purchase you have already made.
These terms are governed by the law of the Czech Republic, and the Czech courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country where you live, and you may also bring proceedings in the courts of that country.
If any clause is found to be invalid or unenforceable, the rest of the terms continue to apply, and the invalid clause is treated as replaced by the closest lawful equivalent.
You may not transfer your rights under these terms to anyone else. We may transfer ours to a successor of the business, provided your rights are not reduced.
These terms, together with our Refund & Cancellation Policy, our Privacy Policy and our Cookie Policy, are the whole agreement between us about the service. The payment transaction itself is additionally governed by Stripe’s consumer terms, as described in the clause on plans, prices and payment.
Questions about these terms, your account or a purchase go through our support form. Questions about your personal data go through our support form. Our postal address is in the clause on who you are contracting with.
We aim to reply within 14 days.
