Terms of Service

1Who we are, and what these terms cover

Civil Ashram is a sole proprietorship registered in Kota, Rajasthan, India, with GSTIN 08CRXPP9491C1ZV, at 1063, Mahaveer Nagar Second, Kota, Rajasthan – 324005, India. Our proprietor and Grievance Officer is Deepika Patni. In this policy, “we”, “us” and “our” mean Civil Ashram, and “you” means the person or business using our Services.

“Business day” means Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays in Rajasthan, India. Saturday is counted only when we measure our support response targets, never when we measure a refund, a despatch or a delivery.

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your use of every one of our Services as defined above, and any course, subscription or service you buy from us. By accessing or using any of them you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the Services.

These Terms sit alongside our Privacy Policy, Refund & Cancellation Policy, Service Delivery Policy, Shipping & Delivery Policy and Data Deletion Instructions. Where you have signed a separate written agreement with us — for example a statement of work or an enterprise contract — that agreement takes priority over these Terms wherever the two differ.

2What we provide

• Technology and consultancy — IT consultancy, websites and web applications, mobile apps and custom software, AI and data work, and digital marketing.
• Arth Messenger — WhatsApp automation built on the official WhatsApp Business Platform, sold as a subscription with optional add-on modules.
• Tools — utilities such as our QR Generator and Find My Photos.
• Civil services guidance — video lectures, solved papers, notes, newspaper clippings and community resources for UPSC and state public service examinations.

Not every feature is available on every website or in every plan, and what is included in a plan is described on the page where that plan is sold. We serve customers worldwide; some features depend on third parties who restrict certain countries, and where that applies we say so before you buy.

3Who may use our services

• You must be 18 years of age or older to buy anything from us, to hold a paid account, or to enter into these Terms.
• If you are under 18, you may use our freely available study material only with the verifiable consent of a parent or legal guardian, and that adult must be the one who provides any personal details and who accepts these Terms on your behalf.
• If you are accepting these Terms for a business, you confirm you are authorised to bind that business, and “you” means that business.
• You must give us accurate information and keep it up to date. Much of what we do — invoices, verification with Meta, delivery — depends on it.

How we handle a young person’s data is set out in our Privacy Policy, and the two documents say the same thing.

4Your account

• Keep your login details private. You are responsible for what happens under your account.
• Tell us straight away at info@civilashram.co.in if you think someone else has got into your account. Once you have told us, you are not responsible for what happens afterwards through that unauthorised access.
• You may log in using an email and password, or through a third-party login such as Facebook. If you use a third-party login, that provider’s terms apply to your use of their service.
• One account is for one business or one person. Sharing a single account across unrelated businesses is not permitted, and is dealt with in section 5.

5How you may use our services

Use the Services lawfully and considerately. In particular, you must not:

• break any law or regulation that applies to you, or to the people you message;
• infringe anyone’s rights, including copyright, trade marks and privacy;
• upload or send content that is harmful, abusive, defamatory, obscene, deceptive or misleading;
• try to get unauthorised access to our systems, another customer’s account, or anyone’s data;
• interfere with or disrupt the Services, or attempt to overwhelm them;
• send spam, or message anyone through Arth Messenger who has not opted in to hear from you;
• resell or sub-licence access to a plan bought for your own business, unless we have agreed it in writing;
• copy, scrape or redistribute our study material, course content or software.

6Prices, taxes and payment

• Prices are published on the page where the service is sold. The total you will pay, including tax, is always shown to you before you confirm a payment.
• Goods and Services Tax is charged where it applies, at the rate the law sets. We are registered under GSTIN 08CRXPP9491C1ZV and we issue a tax invoice for every payment.
• Arth Messenger is sold in Indian rupees to customers in India and in US dollars to customers elsewhere. If your bank converts currency or charges a cross-border fee, that is between you and your bank.
• Payments are handled by our payment partners. We never see or store your full card number.
• WhatsApp message charges are Meta’s charges, not ours. We pass them through exactly as Meta bills them, with no markup added. Meta sets those rates and can change them.
• If a payment fails we will tell you and retry. We allow a grace period of 3 business days before anything is suspended.

Plans start from ₹199 per month. Where we have promised you a founding or locked price, we honour it for the full period promised.

7Subscriptions, renewal and cancellation

• Subscriptions renew automatically at the end of each billing period until you cancel. We tell you this at checkout, and we email you before every annual renewal.
• You can cancel at any time — from the billing screen in your account, or by emailing us. There is no cancellation fee, no notice period and no lock-in, and we will never make you sit through a retention call.
• Cancelling takes effect at the end of the period you have already paid for. You keep full access until then.
• We will not raise the price of a period you have already paid for. A price change applies only from your next renewal, and we give you at least 30 days’ notice by email so you can leave before it takes effect.
• Upgrading takes effect immediately and is charged pro rata. Downgrading takes effect at your next renewal, so you keep what you have paid for.

The full detail, including what happens to an annual plan, is in our Refund & Cancellation Policy.

8Refunds, delivery and shipping

These are set out in full in three separate policies, which form part of this agreement:

• our Refund & Cancellation Policy — when you can cancel, when we refund, and how long it takes;
• our Service Delivery Policy — what we deliver, how quickly, and what depends on Meta;
• our Shipping & Delivery Policy — instant digital delivery, and how any printed material is sent.

In short: we always refund you in cash where the failure is ours, where you were charged twice or at the wrong price, or where we could not deliver what you paid for. Nothing in those policies limits any right you have under the Consumer Protection Act, 2019.

9Our intellectual property

Everything we have made — the text, graphics, logos, software, course material, designs and the arrangement of them — belongs to us or is licensed to us, and is protected by law. “Civil Ashram” and “Arth Messenger” are our marks.

You may read, download and print our material for your own use, and use our software as your plan permits. You may not copy it, republish it, redistribute it, sell it, or make anything derived from it without our written permission. Ask us — for teaching and non-commercial use we usually say yes.

10Your content

Anything you give us or put into our Services — your messages, your contacts, your files, your form submissions — stays yours. We do not claim ownership of it.

So that we can actually run the service, you give us a limited licence to store, process, transmit and display that content. That licence is:

• non-exclusive — you can do whatever else you like with your content;
• limited to providing the Services to you — we do not use your content to market to anybody, we do not sell it, and we never use one customer’s content for another;
• royalty-free — we do not pay you and you do not pay us for it;
• revocable — it ends when you delete the content or close your account, apart from backups that are overwritten on their normal cycle and records we are required by law to keep.

You are responsible for having the right to share what you upload, and for having consent from the people you message. If you believe something on our Services infringes your rights, write to info@civilashram.co.in and we will look at it and act promptly.

11Third-party platforms and links

Our Services connect to, or link to, services run by other companies — among them Meta’s WhatsApp Business Platform, Facebook, Google, YouTube, LinkedIn, and our payment partners. Their terms and their privacy policies govern your use of them, and we do not control them.

Civil Ashram is an independent business. We are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a partner of WhatsApp LLC or Meta Platforms, Inc. Arth Messenger is built on Meta’s official platform, and some things — business verification, the green tick, template approval, messaging limits and message pricing — are Meta’s decision, not ours. Our Service Delivery Policy explains exactly where that line falls.

12Educational content, and no guarantee of results

Our civil services material is provided for education and information. We do not guarantee any examination result, any rank, any selection, or any career outcome, and no refund is available on the basis of a result. Preparation is yours to do; we can only give you good material and honest guidance.

If a specific programme ever carries a written guarantee, that guarantee will be stated in that programme’s own terms and we will honour it exactly as written.

13Availability and changes to the Services

• We work hard to keep the Services running, and we publish an availability target and service credits in our Service Delivery Policy. We do not promise uninterrupted or error-free access — nobody honestly can.
• We may add, change or remove features. Where a change materially reduces something you are paying for, we give you at least 30 days’ notice, and you may cancel and take a pro-rata refund of the unused period.
• If we discontinue a service entirely, we give at least 30 days’ notice, help you export your data, and refund every unused day pro rata in cash.
• Planned maintenance is done outside office hours wherever possible, with at least 24 hours’ notice. Emergency security work may be done without notice, and we tell you afterwards what happened.

14What we do and do not promise

What we promise. We will provide the Services with reasonable care and skill, by people who know what they are doing. We will describe what we sell accurately. We will tell you honestly when something has gone wrong, including when it is our fault.

What we do not promise. Beyond that, and to the extent the law allows, the Services are provided “as is”. We do not give implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement, and we do not warrant that the Services will meet every requirement you have in mind or work uninterrupted.

15Limits on our liability

We accept responsibility for the harm we actually cause. We do not accept unlimited responsibility for everything that might follow from it — no small business could, and pretending otherwise would only make our prices higher.

The cap. Our total liability to you for all claims arising in any twelve-month period is limited to the greater of: the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose, or ₹10,000.

What we do not pay for. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, for lost profits or lost revenue, for lost business opportunity, or for loss of data where you could reasonably have exported or backed it up — and we make export available to you at all times.

What the cap never covers. These limits do not apply, and we do not attempt to exclude our liability, for:

• death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
• fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation by us;
• our gross negligence or wilful misconduct;
• our obligation to refund money you paid for a service you did not receive;
• anything else that the law does not permit us to limit or exclude.

These limits apply equally to us and, where relevant, to you — we will not claim indirect or consequential losses from you either.

16Putting each other right

If your use of the Services causes a third party to bring a claim against us — for example because you sent messages to people who had not consented, or uploaded content you did not have the right to use — you agree to cover the reasonable, direct costs we incur in dealing with that claim.

This works both ways, and it is limited. It does not apply where the claim arose from something we did wrong. We will tell you promptly about any such claim, we will not settle it without talking to you first, and you may take over the defence of it if you wish. If you are a consumer rather than a business, this section does not apply to you at all.

17Suspension and ending the agreement

17.1 You can leave at any time

Cancel from your account or by emailing us. What happens to money already paid is in our Refund & Cancellation Policy.

17.2 When we may suspend or end it

• Non-payment — after we have told you and allowed a grace period of 3 business days.
• Serious misuse — spam, messaging people who did not consent, unlawful or fraudulent content, or anything that puts our WhatsApp Business Platform access at risk. Serious cases may be suspended immediately.
• A legal requirement — where Meta or a competent authority requires it.
• Other breaches — we will tell you what is wrong and give you a reasonable chance to put it right before we act.

We will always tell you why. Suspension is not termination: your data is preserved throughout and service resumes as soon as the cause is resolved.

17.3 What happens to your money and your data

• If we end the agreement and you were not at fault, we refund every unused day pro rata, in cash.
• If we end it because of a serious breach by you, we keep only the value of what we actually delivered before the account was stopped, and we refund the rest. We do not keep money for a service you did not receive, even where you were at fault.
• You can export your contacts, message history and reports at any time, and for 30 days after the account ends. We will never hold your data back over a billing dispute.

18What survives after the agreement ends

These sections continue to apply after you stop using the Services, for as long as they sensibly need to: 9 (our intellectual property), 10 (your content, as regards anything already lawfully processed), 14 (what we do and do not promise), 15 (limits on liability), 16 (putting each other right), 18 (this section), 19 (governing law) and 21 (contact and grievances). Any money owed on either side also survives.

19Governing law, and how disputes are handled

These Terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts at Kota, Rajasthan have exclusive jurisdiction.

Please come to us first. Almost every dispute is settled in a few days by email. Write to our Grievance Officer using the details below. We will acknowledge within 24 hours and resolve within 15 days.

If you are a consumer, nothing in this section stops you from bringing a complaint to a consumer forum or another regulator where you live, and we will not treat that as a breach of these Terms.

20Changes to these terms

We may update these Terms. When we do we change the “Last updated” date at the top of the page.

• Where a change materially affects your rights or increases your obligations, we give you at least 30 days’ notice by email before it takes effect.
• A change never applies retrospectively to a service you have already paid for.
• If you do not accept a change, you may cancel before it takes effect and take a pro-rata refund of any unused prepaid period.
• Continuing to use the Services after a change takes effect means you accept the updated Terms.

Earlier versions are available on request from info@civilashram.co.in.