Terms of Service

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) govern your access to and use of the SurgiTest websites, web applications, mobile applications, educational content, voice-enabled exam experiences, learning tools, communications, and related services (collectively, the “Service”). The Service is operated by SurgiTest LLC (“SurgiTest,” “we,” “us,” or “our”).

By creating an account, activating a Readiness Pass, purchasing or receiving access to a package, joining a Board Group, accepting an organization-sponsored seat, or otherwise using the Service, you agree to these Terms. If you do not agree, do not use the Service.

You must be at least 18 years old and old enough to enter a binding contract where you live. You may not use the Service if applicable law prohibits you from doing so. If you use the Service on behalf of a business, hospital, university, residency or fellowship program, professional organization, or other entity, you represent that you have authority to bind that entity to any terms you accept on its behalf.

Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal data. Additional terms may apply to a specific feature, promotion, institutional deployment, order form, business associate agreement, data-processing agreement, or other written arrangement. Those supplemental terms control only to the extent they expressly conflict with these Terms for the subject they cover.

You must provide accurate, current, and complete account information and keep it updated. You may maintain only the number of accounts that SurgiTest expressly permits. Accounts are personal and non-transferable unless an authorized institutional workflow expressly provides otherwise.

You are responsible for safeguarding your credentials and for activity performed through your account. Do not share passwords, authentication links, access tokens, or session credentials. Notify us promptly at support@surgitest.com if you suspect unauthorized access, loss of credentials, or another security incident involving your account.

Your access is limited to your own educational use and to the features, specialty, package, seat, and usage limits assigned to your account. You may not share an account, evade plan limits, alter entitlement data, or allow another person to complete activities under your identity. We may require reauthentication or other reasonable verification before allowing sensitive account actions.

An institution or other organization may invite you to an organization-sponsored seat. The organization may manage the seat, roster status, assignments, and access period under its agreement with SurgiTest. The specific information visible to authorized administrators or faculty depends on the organization's configuration and will be described in the applicable notice, invitation, or institutional terms.

Loss of an organization-sponsored seat may end access to organization-funded features. It does not give an organization ownership of your account credentials or billing information. Any option to convert an organization-sponsored account to an individual package will be shown in the Service if available.

Eligible new users may receive a Free SurgiTest Readiness Pass. The Readiness Pass costs $0, does not require a payment card, and does not automatically convert into a paid subscription or other paid package. Creating an account alone does not start the seven-day access window. The window starts when you consume the first included live oral-board case.

Unless the offer shown to you states otherwise, the Readiness Pass ends at the earlier of (a) seven days after activation or (b) completion or consumption of all included activities. The standard Readiness Pass includes one complete live oral-board case with the production examiner, speech-recognition, text-to-speech, grading, and feedback flow; one short first-attempt Board Answer Lab drill; one Diagnostic Reasoning drill; one Rescue Reflex Complication Rescue drill; one curated Reading Guide resource; one personalized readiness snapshot; and, for supported personal-case or case-list specialties, one synthetic Case Defense demonstration.

The Readiness Pass does not include personal uploads, unlimited retries, complete libraries, or full longitudinal histories. We may limit the Readiness Pass to one per eligible person and may refuse, suspend, or revoke it for duplicate accounts, automation, self-referral, fraud, or other abuse.

As of the date of this version, the standard customer-facing packages are the SurgiTest Specialty Package at $499 for 12 months and the SurgiTest Case Defense Package at $999 for 12 months, before applicable taxes. The price, term, included features, and any promotional terms displayed at checkout control your purchase.

The Case Defense Package may be purchased by any eligible user, but personal-case ingestion and case-specific defense features are available only for specialties and workflows that SurgiTest supports. Other features may vary by specialty, platform, device capability, jurisdiction, or rollout status. We do not promise that every feature will be available for every specialty or on every device.

Paid individual packages renew automatically for successive 12-month terms unless you cancel before the renewal date or checkout expressly states that the purchase is non-renewing. By completing checkout, you authorize SurgiTest and its payment processor to charge the payment method on file for the then-current package price, applicable taxes, and any charges you expressly approve.

The Readiness Pass is not an automatic-renewal offer and does not create a paid subscription. You must affirmatively select and purchase a paid package after or during the Readiness Pass to become a paying subscriber.

Individual web payments are processed by Stripe or another payment provider identified at checkout. We do not receive or store your complete payment-card number. You authorize the payment provider to store and use your payment method as needed to process authorized charges, renewals, refunds, credits, taxes, and payment disputes.

Prices are exclusive of sales, use, value-added, goods-and-services, or similar taxes unless checkout says otherwise. You are responsible for applicable taxes and for fees charged by your bank or payment provider, including foreign-transaction or currency-conversion fees.

You may be offered the ability to upgrade from the Specialty Package to the Case Defense Package. The timing, credit, proration, and effective date shown in the upgrade flow control. Downgrades, when offered, generally take effect at the end of the current paid term. A change in package may alter access to stored features, histories, personal-case workflows, or other premium functionality.

Legacy accounts may retain earlier internal entitlement labels, usage balances, or transition rules. Those internal labels do not create a right to purchase a discontinued package or to receive features beyond the entitlement actually assigned to the account.

You may cancel an automatically renewing individual package through the billing or subscription settings provided in the Service. A support-assisted cancellation path is available at support@surgitest.com. To avoid the next renewal charge, complete cancellation before the renewal date shown in your account or billing portal. Deleting the mobile app does not cancel a package.

After timely cancellation, access ordinarily continues through the end of the paid term and then ends or changes to the access level then available to your account. Cancellation does not delete your account or learning data. Account deletion is addressed in Section 15 and the Privacy Policy.

Except where required by law or expressly stated in the offer, paid fees are non-refundable and we do not provide prorated refunds for unused time, partial use, specialty changes, exam-date changes, or cancellation before the end of a paid term. We may issue a refund, credit, or other remedy in our discretion for a verified billing error, prolonged Service failure, or another exceptional circumstance.

Nothing in these Terms limits a refund, cancellation, cooling-off, or other consumer right that cannot be waived under applicable law. Contact support promptly if you believe a charge is incorrect.

If an authorized charge fails, we may retry it, ask you to update your payment method, limit access, or suspend the package. We may reverse credits, Group Rate benefits, or access associated with a refunded, disputed, reversed, fraudulent, or unauthorized payment. Before initiating a chargeback, please contact us so we can investigate and attempt to resolve the issue.

We may change prices for future purchases or renewal terms. If an existing automatically renewing package will renew at a higher standard price, we will provide advance notice as required by law. You may cancel before the new price takes effect. Promotional offers may have separate eligibility, expiration, and non-stacking rules and may be withdrawn where permitted by law.

A Board Group is a private accountability group of two to five independently billed users. Each member keeps a separate account, subscription, payment method, cancellation decision, and private learning record. A group owner may manage invitations, the group name, and group settings, but does not own or control another member's account.

Subject to the eligibility rules shown in the Service, eligible annual members may receive a first-term Group Rate of 5% for two eligible paid members, 10% for three, 15% for four, and 20% for five. The percentage applies to each eligible member's pre-tax annual package charge. Taxes, payment-provider fees, add-ons, and other non-membership charges are excluded.

A qualifying group must be formed through the server-authorized group flow. At least one successfully paid eligible annual checkout initiated through the group during its 14-day formation window must anchor the Group Rate. As the group reaches a higher tier, prior eligible members may receive only the incremental adjustment needed to equalize the applicable tier. The benefit may be delivered as a partial refund, account credit, or checkout adjustment.

The Group Rate applies only to the eligible first annual term identified by SurgiTest, does not stack with other coupons, promotions, or discounts unless expressly stated, and is limited to one active group and one first-term Group Rate claim per account or subscription term. Complimentary, institutional, monthly, refunded, disputed, fraudulent, self-referred, duplicate, or otherwise ineligible accounts do not count.

Board Groups are not public social networks. By default, members may see limited group information such as membership, weekly commitments, completion status, candidate-safe verified activity summaries, and encouragements. Exact scores, detailed feedback, transcripts, personal-case content, uploaded materials, audio, and billing details are not shared with the group unless you deliberately use an available sharing control.

You may not use Board Groups for harassment, discrimination, spam, impersonation, unauthorized disclosure of another member's shared information, self-referral, duplicate-account schemes, resale, or discount manipulation. We may withhold or reverse a benefit obtained through fraud, chargeback, collusion, or abuse. We will not ordinarily claw back a legitimately delivered Group Rate solely because another member later leaves the group.

SurgiTest provides simulated oral-board and certifying-exam practice, examiner interactions, speech-enabled sessions, grading, feedback, specialty-specific learning content, Daily Briefs, Board Answer Lab, Diagnostic Reasoning, Complication Rescue, Critical Error review, Reading Guides, Guidelines, personal-case preparation, portfolio insights, and other educational features. Features may use artificial intelligence, deterministic rules, curated content, human-authored materials, or a combination of these methods.

The Service may generate simulated scores, readiness estimates, strengths, improvement areas, critical-error classifications, case-mix or portfolio coverage, targeted reassessment plans, and related-content recommendations. These are educational inferences designed to support practice. They are not official board scores, clinical competency determinations, employment decisions, credentialing decisions, licensure decisions, or guarantees of future performance.

Unless we expressly state otherwise in writing, SurgiTest is not affiliated with, sponsored by, endorsed by, or an official product of any medical specialty board, certifying body, examination committee, residency or fellowship program, hospital, university, or professional society. References to exam formats, scoring concepts, specialties, guidelines, or organizations are for educational and descriptive purposes only.

We may add, modify, improve, limit, suspend, or discontinue features, content, providers, model versions, voices, specialties, or workflows. We will not materially reduce a paid package solely to avoid delivering the core value represented at purchase, but individual features may change as the Service evolves. Beta, preview, staged-rollout, or experimental features may be less reliable and may be changed or removed.

The Service is for board-preparation and professional education only. It is not intended to diagnose, prevent, monitor, predict, treat, or manage a disease or condition; make a clinical decision; provide an emergency response; or substitute for independent professional judgment. Do not use SurgiTest to make a decision about an actual patient or to communicate real patient information.

“User Content” means text, answers, notes, voice input, transcripts, de-identified case information, files, images, documents, feedback, and other material that you submit to or generate through the Service. As between you and SurgiTest, you retain the rights you hold in your User Content. These Terms do not transfer ownership of your User Content to us.

You grant SurgiTest a worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sublicensable license to host, store, reproduce, transmit, format, adapt, analyze, and otherwise process User Content solely as reasonably needed to provide, secure, maintain, troubleshoot, support, and improve the Service; create the outputs you request; enforce these Terms; comply with law; and protect users and the Service.

We may use aggregated or de-identified information to evaluate and improve educational quality, prompts, rubrics, reliability, safety, and product performance. We do not use raw candidate audio, full private transcripts, or personal-case uploads to train a general-purpose third-party AI model unless you separately and expressly choose to participate in a program that clearly states otherwise.

If you upload a personal case, case log, operative note, image, PDF, spreadsheet, media file, or other material, you represent and warrant that:

• you have the right and authority to submit and process the material;
• it has been sufficiently de-identified and contains no protected health information, patient identifiers, or other information that could reasonably identify a real patient;
• its submission does not violate a law, court order, confidentiality duty, employment obligation, training-program rule, hospital policy, institutional policy, or third-party right;
• it does not contain copyrighted or proprietary material that you lack permission to use; and
• SurgiTest may transform it into structured cases, examiner questions, preparation checklists, portfolio classifications, grading artifacts, related-learning recommendations, and other private educational outputs for your account.

SurgiTest may use automated and manual controls to reject, quarantine, redact, or delete content that appears to contain protected health information (“PHI”), patient identifiers, unlawful content, or unsupported material. These controls are safeguards, not a guarantee that every identifier will be detected. You remain responsible for de-identification before submission.

Unless SurgiTest has expressly signed a written business associate agreement applicable to your specific use, the Service is not intended to receive PHI and must not be used as a clinical record system or HIPAA workflow.

Voice-enabled features may process candidate audio through SurgiTest's MedASR speech-recognition pipeline and, under the existing fallback or corroboration policy, device speech-recognition services. The server-authorized transcript and uncertainty metadata may be used by the examiner and grader. Raw candidate audio is processing data rather than part of your ordinary retained learning record. Depending on the workflow, it may be transient or retained temporarily through the server acknowledgment, recovery, grading, or authorized-review boundary and then deleted under the applicable lifecycle, unless a support, security, or legal hold requires otherwise.

SurgiTest may synthesize examiner speech from text through a text-to-speech provider. Generated examiner audio may be cached briefly for reliable playback. We do not use candidate voice input to identify you, create a voiceprint, or perform biometric authentication.

User Content is private to your account except as described in the Privacy Policy, an organization-specific notice, or a sharing action you deliberately take. Board Group sharing is limited as described in Section 4. Authorized faculty or administrators may receive specified information only when an institutional feature or agreement enables that access and the applicable visibility has been disclosed.

When you delete a supported session, personal case, or account, we will delete or de-link the associated active User Content and private derived artifacts according to the Privacy Policy, subject to legal, security, fraud-prevention, dispute, backup, and technical exceptions. Deleting a source personal case may remove related defense plans, question sets, classifications, and portfolio insights. Deletion may be irreversible.

Voluntary ideas, feature requests, design suggestions, and general product comments that do not contain private account content are “Product Feedback.” You grant SurgiTest a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free right to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, and incorporate Product Feedback without restriction or compensation. Do not submit Product Feedback that you consider confidential or proprietary.

Technical-support requests, clinical-content concerns, transcript-correction requests, audio-review requests, score-review requests, and case-specific reports are not treated as public Product Feedback. We process them as private support submissions under the Privacy Policy. The Service may attach limited diagnostic metadata, such as your specialty, route, case or version identifier, session or turn identifier, app and device version, feature flags, non-sensitive error identifiers, and timestamp.

Full transcripts, candidate audio, personal-case uploads, and other sensitive materials will not be attached automatically. We may request your explicit permission before retrieving or reviewing those materials. You must not include PHI or patient identifiers in a support submission or screenshot.

A review request does not guarantee that a transcript, score, grade, case, answer key, or other output will change. SurgiTest may correct an error, preserve the original result, add an explanatory note, invalidate an affected item, issue a credit, or take another reasonable action. Educational judgments may involve professional discretion and may not have a single objectively correct resolution.

Subject to these Terms and your valid access entitlement, SurgiTest grants you a limited, revocable, non-exclusive, non-transferable, non-sublicensable license to access and use the Service for your personal, non-commercial board-preparation and professional-education activities.

You may not, and may not help another person to:

• use the Service unlawfully, to harm another person, or in violation of professional, institutional, exam, confidentiality, privacy, or intellectual-property obligations;
• use the Service for actual patient care, clinical decision-making, emergency response, or transmission of PHI, real patient records, identifiable images, or patient identifiers;
• share, sell, rent, transfer, sublicense, or provide access to an account, package, seat, invitation, or authentication credential;
• evade usage limits, specialty restrictions, payment controls, security measures, content protections, feature flags, or entitlement checks;
• scrape, crawl, harvest, bulk-download, mirror, republish, distribute, publicly display, record, or create a competing bank from SurgiTest questions, cases, grading rubrics, model outputs, images, transcripts, or other protected content, except for personal exports expressly enabled by the Service;
• reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, discover source code, extract prompts or model weights, conduct systematic model-extraction attacks, or use automated agents to reconstruct protected logic or content;
• probe, scan, test, overload, disrupt, bypass, or interfere with the Service, infrastructure, security, authentication, rate limits, monitoring, or another user's access;
• introduce malware, malicious instructions, prompt-injection payloads, corrupted files, or code intended to alter, exfiltrate, or damage data or systems;
• upload material you do not have a right to use, impersonate another person, falsify affiliation or credentials, manipulate Board Group eligibility, or create deceptive or duplicate accounts;
• harass, threaten, discriminate against, defame, spam, or abuse another user, group member, support agent, reviewer, contractor, or SurgiTest representative; or
• use SurgiTest Content or outputs to train, benchmark, evaluate, or improve a commercial competing model, dataset, product, or service without our prior written permission.

We may investigate suspected violations and take proportionate action, including limiting a feature, removing content, preserving evidence, withholding a promotion, suspending access, terminating an account, notifying an institution where lawfully appropriate, or cooperating with lawful authorities. We are not required to monitor all activity and do not assume responsibility for User Content merely because we may review or remove it.

The Service and all content provided by or on behalf of SurgiTest, including software, source and object code, interfaces, designs, databases, cases, questions, answer structures, rubrics, simulations, classifications, educational materials, images, graphics, videos, audio, voices, prompts, model orchestration, compilations, and documentation (collectively, “SurgiTest Content”) are owned by SurgiTest or its licensors and protected by intellectual-property and other laws.

Except for the limited license in Section 8.1, no right, title, or interest in the Service or SurgiTest Content is transferred to you. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.

SurgiTest, associated logos, product names, feature names, and slogans are trademarks or trade dress of SurgiTest LLC or its licensors. You may not use them in a manner that suggests sponsorship, affiliation, or endorsement without prior written permission. Third-party marks belong to their respective owners.

Where the Service offers a personal export, download, transcript, or report, you may use that material for your own non-commercial study and recordkeeping. The export may combine your User Content with SurgiTest Content. Your ownership of User Content does not give you ownership of SurgiTest templates, rubrics, questions, software, or other protected elements included in an output.

Certain references, publications, guidelines, images, or other materials may be licensed from, linked to, or attributed to third parties and remain subject to their own rights and terms. Inclusion does not imply endorsement by the third party or transfer ownership to you or SurgiTest.

Our Privacy Policy describes the categories of personal data we collect, how we use and disclose them, AI and speech-processing practices, retention, cookies, institutional and Board Group visibility, international transfers, and your choices and rights. It is incorporated into these Terms by reference for purposes of describing our data practices.

We may send communications needed to operate the Service, such as account-verification messages, password resets, security alerts, receipts, renewal or price notices, material legal notices, support responses, and service-status messages. You cannot opt out of messages that are necessary to provide or secure your account, although you may stop them by closing the account where applicable.

Morning Brief Delivery is in-app only by default. Email every morning, push notification, Smart delivery, weekday-only delivery, local-time delivery, and incomplete-brief reminders are optional settings where available. We do not enroll you in Morning Brief email delivery unless you affirmatively turn it on.

If Morning Brief email delivery is made available and you enable it, an email may include a retrieval question, high-yield educational points, an oral-board prompt, a deep link, and a high-level progress cue. It is designed not to include personal-case titles or narratives, uploaded case information, transcripts, candidate audio, detailed scores, patient-like information, or sensitive billing data. Where delivery controls are available, you may pause or change delivery in settings and unsubscribe through the email's one-click control.

You consent to receive legal and account notices electronically at the email address associated with your account or through a prominent in-Service notice. Electronic delivery satisfies any legal requirement that a communication be in writing, to the extent permitted by law. Keep your contact information current.

SurgiTest relies on third-party infrastructure and service providers, including OpenAI business and API services for authorized AI functions; Google Cloud and Firebase for hosting, authentication, storage, security, operational services, and text-to-speech; Stripe for payments; and configured providers for analytics, email delivery, customer support, security, and observability. Our Privacy Policy describes the principal categories and current core providers.

Your use of certain third-party functionality may also be subject to that provider's terms. We remain responsible for our own obligations under these Terms, but we do not control a provider's independent services, networks, devices, or policies.

The Service may link to publications, society pages, journal articles, guidelines, videos, or other external resources. Links are provided for convenience and educational context. SurgiTest does not control or endorse all external content and is not responsible for its availability, accuracy, security, or privacy practices.

The Service and all SurgiTest Content are provided solely for education and information. They do not constitute medical, legal, employment, credentialing, or other professional advice. SurgiTest is not a healthcare provider, and use of the Service does not create a physician-patient, clinician-patient, educator-trainee, fiduciary, or other professional relationship.

SurgiTest does not guarantee that you will pass an examination, receive certification or licensure, obtain a particular score, improve by a particular amount, match an official scoring method, or achieve any academic, professional, employment, or financial result. Performance depends on factors outside our control.

AI-generated examiner responses, grading, feedback, Daily Briefs, personal-case outputs, transcript corrections, score projections, portfolio insights, related-learning suggestions, and citation or retrieval features may be inaccurate or incomplete. Speech recognition may mishear or omit words. A provider or model may fail, time out, or produce inconsistent results. You are responsible for reviewing outputs and using independent judgment.

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, THE SERVICE AND SURGITEST CONTENT ARE PROVIDED “AS IS” AND “AS AVAILABLE,” WITHOUT WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY. SURGITEST DISCLAIMS IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE, NON-INFRINGEMENT, ACCURACY, QUIET ENJOYMENT, AND ANY WARRANTY ARISING FROM COURSE OF DEALING OR USAGE OF TRADE.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure, compatible with every device, or free from harmful components; that data will never be lost; that defects will be corrected; or that a particular feature, provider, model, voice, specialty, or item will remain available. Scheduled maintenance, provider outages, internet conditions, device restrictions, and events beyond our control may affect access.

Some jurisdictions do not allow certain disclaimers or implied-warranty exclusions. In those jurisdictions, the disclaimers in these Terms apply only to the maximum extent permitted by law and do not limit rights that cannot lawfully be waived.

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, SURGITEST AND ITS AFFILIATES, OFFICERS, DIRECTORS, EMPLOYEES, CONTRACTORS, AGENTS, LICENSORS, AND SERVICE PROVIDERS WILL NOT BE LIABLE FOR INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, CONSEQUENTIAL, OR PUNITIVE DAMAGES; LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, BUSINESS, OPPORTUNITY, GOODWILL, DATA, OR USE; BUSINESS INTERRUPTION; COST OF SUBSTITUTE SERVICES; OR HARM ARISING FROM RELIANCE ON EDUCATIONAL OR AI-GENERATED CONTENT, EVEN IF ADVISED THAT SUCH DAMAGES MAY OCCUR.

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, SURGITEST'S TOTAL AGGREGATE LIABILITY FOR ALL CLAIMS ARISING OUT OF OR RELATING TO THE SERVICE OR THESE TERMS WILL NOT EXCEED THE GREATER OF (A) THE AMOUNT YOU PAID DIRECTLY TO SURGITEST FOR THE SERVICE DURING THE 12 MONTHS BEFORE THE EVENT GIVING RISE TO THE CLAIM OR (B) USD $100.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits liability that cannot be excluded or limited under applicable law, including liability for fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, or death or personal injury directly caused by gross negligence or willful misconduct where such liability cannot be waived. Applicable consumer law may provide additional rights.

The disclaimers and limitations in Sections 12 and 13 allocate risk between you and SurgiTest and are an essential basis of the agreement. They apply to all legal theories and to the fullest extent permitted even if a limited remedy fails of its essential purpose.

We may limit, suspend, or terminate access if we reasonably believe you violated these Terms, created a security or legal risk, failed to pay an authorized charge, abused a promotion or Group Rate, infringed rights, submitted PHI, compromised the Service, or used the account without authorization. We may also discontinue all or part of the Service. Where reasonable, we will provide notice and an opportunity to cure, but immediate action may be necessary for safety, security, fraud, legal compliance, or serious misuse.

You may stop using the Service at any time. Canceling an automatically renewing package prevents future renewals but ordinarily does not delete the account, User Content, or learning history. Unless required by law or stated in Section 3, cancellation does not create a refund for the remaining paid term.

You may initiate account deletion through the account settings made available to you or by contacting support@surgitest.com. Account deletion is different from canceling a subscription. The deletion flow will explain any required billing step. Deleting an app from a device does not delete the account or cancel billing.

After identity verification, deletion removes or anonymizes account data and associated private artifacts from active systems according to the Privacy Policy, subject to legal, billing, fraud-prevention, security, dispute, and backup exceptions. Deletion is generally irreversible and may eliminate access to transcripts, scores, personal cases, group history, and purchased benefits.

An organization may remove or decline to renew its sponsored seat. SurgiTest may retain or delete account information according to the applicable institutional agreement, user notice, and Privacy Policy. Ending an institutional relationship does not authorize the organization to access data beyond its disclosed role.

Provisions that by their nature should survive termination will survive, including ownership, licenses needed for retained records, payment obligations, disclaimers, liability limitations, indemnification, dispute resolution, and miscellaneous provisions.

Before filing arbitration or a lawsuit, the complaining party must send a written notice describing the claimant, relevant account email, facts, legal basis, requested relief, and a good-faith calculation of any monetary demand. Notices to SurgiTest must be sent to legal@surgitest.com and SurgiTest LLC, Attn: Legal Department, 16192 Coastal Highway, Lewes, Delaware 19958 USA. The parties will attempt in good faith to resolve the dispute for 30 days after receipt before commencing a formal proceeding.

Except for the matters in Section 17.3, you and SurgiTest agree that any dispute, claim, or controversy arising out of or relating to these Terms, the Privacy Policy, the Service, a package, a transaction, or the relationship between you and SurgiTest will be resolved by final and binding individual arbitration rather than in court. The Federal Arbitration Act governs this agreement to arbitrate.

Either party may bring an eligible individual claim in small-claims court, provided it remains in that court and is not removed or appealed to a court of general jurisdiction. Either party may seek temporary or preliminary injunctive relief in a court of competent jurisdiction to protect intellectual property, confidential information, account security, or the status quo while arbitration is pending. A government agency may pursue relief within its lawful authority.

Arbitration will be administered by the American Arbitration Association (“AAA”) under the AAA Consumer Arbitration Rules in effect when the claim is filed, as modified by these Terms. If AAA is unavailable or declines to administer the matter, the parties will select another established provider or a court will appoint an arbitrator. One neutral arbitrator will decide the dispute and may award any individual relief available in court, subject to these Terms and applicable law.

Consumer arbitration may proceed by video, telephone, written submissions, or an in-person hearing. If an in-person hearing is required, it may occur in or near your county of residence, in Wilmington, Delaware, or at another mutually agreed location. The arbitrator may permit a reasonable, proportionate exchange of non-privileged information consistent with the efficient nature of arbitration.

Filing, administrative, and arbitrator fees will be allocated under the applicable AAA consumer rules and law. SurgiTest will pay fees it is required to pay under those rules. Each party is responsible for its own attorneys' fees and costs unless applicable law or the arbitrator authorizes an award. The arbitrator will issue a reasoned written decision upon request, and judgment may be entered in a court with jurisdiction.

TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY LAW, YOU AND SURGITEST WAIVE THE RIGHT TO A JURY TRIAL. CLAIMS MAY BE BROUGHT ONLY IN AN INDIVIDUAL CAPACITY, NOT AS A PLAINTIFF OR CLASS MEMBER IN A CLASS, COLLECTIVE, CONSOLIDATED, MASS, PRIVATE-ATTORNEY-GENERAL, OR REPRESENTATIVE ACTION. THE ARBITRATOR MAY NOT CONSOLIDATE CLAIMS OR AWARD RELIEF FOR ANYONE OTHER THAN THE INDIVIDUAL CLAIMANT, EXCEPT WITH THE EXPRESS WRITTEN CONSENT OF ALL PARTIES.

You may opt out of this arbitration agreement by emailing legal@surgitest.com within 30 days after you first accept these Terms, or within 30 days after we notify you of a material change to this Section that gives rise to a new opt-out right under applicable law. Include your full name, mailing address, account email, and a clear statement that you opt out of the arbitration agreement. Opting out does not affect the remaining Terms. Disputes will then proceed in the courts identified in Section 16, subject to applicable law.

If a portion of this arbitration agreement is unenforceable, it will be severed and the remainder enforced to the maximum extent permitted. If the class-action waiver in Section 17.7 is found unenforceable as to a particular claim or remedy, that claim or remedy will proceed in court after all arbitrable matters are completed, unless applicable law requires a different result.