QDD terms of service
These terms are the agreement between you and CrumbQuest LLC, a New Mexico limited liability company, 1209 Mountain Road Pl NE, Albuquerque, NM 87110, USA, covering the QDD (青豆丁) app and the website at qingdouding.com. Using either means you accept them. If you do not, don’t use them.
How we handle information is a separate document: the privacy policy.
Who can use QDD
QDD is for tutors keeping their own teaching records. You need to be 18 or older, able to enter a contract, and a human — accounts registered by scripts or bots are not allowed. One person, one account: QDD has no way to invite an assistant, share a student, or hand an account to someone else.
Keep your sign-in to yourself. Passwords are stored only as a hash, so we never see the original; if you turn on Face ID or fingerprint unlock, the credential lives in your device’s own keychain. Only one device per account can have it: once it is set up, a second device is not offered it and signs in with the password instead, and the first device is unaffected. The credential is also stored so that iOS destroys it the moment that device’s own biometric set changes — a phone that is sold, reset, or has another fingerprint added loses it outright, without us doing anything. Tell us straight away if you think someone else has got into your account. What happens under your account is your responsibility.
What QDD is, and what it is not
QDD is a record-keeping tool. It holds your schedule, your lesson history, and your record of what has been paid and what is owed.
No money moves through QDD. It is not a payment processor, a bank, or a payment service of any kind, and it is not connected to one. When you mark a lesson paid, you are writing down something that happened somewhere else — in cash, by Zelle, by check. If a payment never arrives, that is between you and the family, and QDD has no part in it and cannot recover it.
QDD is also not accounting, tax or legal advice. The numbers it shows you are arithmetic on what you entered. Before you rely on them for a tax return or anything else that matters, check them, and talk to someone qualified.
Your records are yours, and so is the responsibility for them
Everything about a student or family in QDD is there because you typed it in. That means:
- You are responsible for having agreement before you enter someone’s details. Where the student is a child, that agreement has to come from a parent or guardian; where the student is an adult, it is their own. “Where your data lives” below has one more thing you need to tell them.
- You are responsible for what you write in a note. Write about a student the way you would be comfortable with them reading later.
- You are responsible for the accuracy of what you record, including prices and payments.
- You are responsible for following the law that applies to you — anti-spam rules, data protection and privacy law, and tax in particular.
Please do not put things in QDD that it was never built to protect — government ID numbers, card or bank details, medical records. It has no field that asks for them. But notes are free text and support tickets accept image and PDF uploads, so technically you could. Please don’t.
Where your data lives
QDD is run by CrumbQuest LLC in the United States, and your records and your students’ records are stored in the United States. To actually run the service we rely on these providers, and your data passes through them:
- Railway — servers and the database, where the records live. Both are in the western United States (California).
- Cloudflare — both the site and the app sit behind it. Your request reaches the edge node nearest you and is passed on to our servers: it is somewhere requests travel through, not somewhere they are kept. The archive of messages sent on your behalf and statement PDFs are marked not to be cached, so no copy is left at an edge node.
- Twilio SendGrid — all mail in and out, including the messages we send parents for you and anything you send us by replying to a support email.
- Microsoft OneDrive (United States) — the nightly off-site backup.
Apple is not on that list: it distributes the app, and no student record, lesson or parent address ever reaches it. The App Store section below covers what does apply if you installed it that way.
There is nobody else. The app carries no analytics code and no third-party error reporting, and even its fonts are served from our own servers.
If you teach in mainland China, read this together with the consent point above. The student records you enter are transferred out of China and stored in the United States. Under China’s Personal Information Protection Law, the personal information of a child under 14 is sensitive personal information and needs a guardian’s consent to process at all; sending it abroad additionally requires telling the family who the overseas recipient is, why, and what is being stored — and getting separate consent for that specifically. Where the student is an adult, that consent is theirs to give, not a guardian’s.
So when you explain this to a family — or to the student directly, if they are an adult — say plainly that the records will be held in the United States by CrumbQuest LLC, and get their agreement to that on its own rather than folded in with everything else. A family can see, correct or delete their records through you, or by writing directly to hello@qingdouding.com.
Who can see your records
Normally, only you.
But leaving it there would not be honest. There are very few of us, and to help with a problem you have raised, a small number of us can open your account and see what you see — including the messages sent to parents on your behalf. That does not need your say-so first, but it is not casual either:
- Getting in requires the operator to re-enter their own password or biometric at that moment. Being signed in as an admin is not enough on its own.
- A written reason is required. Without one the request is refused, and the reason goes into the log.
- Every visit is recorded: who, when, and what was opened.
- The session lasts 30 minutes at most. It ends on time and does not extend because someone is still working.
If we change something while we are in there, your own activity history shows that entry marked “By support”. If we only look — open the account, read the activity list, pull up an archived email — that is recorded on our side only, and you will not see it. Those are two different things, so we are not going to blur them.
Beyond that, we do not read your records out of curiosity, we do not use them for advertising, and we do not use them to train models. Nothing in QDD sends your content to an AI provider today — if that ever changes, it will be written here first.
Email QDD sends for you
QDD can email parents on your behalf: statements, payment confirmations, lesson reminders, payment reminders, schedule changes. Those messages go out under your name, and they are your messages.
There is one more that you do not send deliberately. The first time you enter a parent’s email address, QDD sends that address a notice explaining that you have added them and where to click if it is not their address. Until that notice has gone out, QDD will not send anything else to it.
So only enter an address for a family you actually teach and who expects to hear from you. QDD is not a mailing-list tool, and using it to send bulk or unsolicited email is not allowed. We may stop sending to an address that bounces, gets reported as spam, or uses the “this isn’t my email” link, and we may stop sending for an account that is generating complaints.
The parent’s side of it
Parents do not register and cannot open the app. But every message they get carries a link to a page we host, where they can choose which kinds of message they receive, or click “this isn’t my email”.
What a parent chooses there overrides your settings in the app. If you have a category switched on and the parent has switched it off, it does not go — and those switches are read-only on your side, so you cannot put them back. Two of them, schedule changes and payment confirmations, are parent-only: you have no switch for those at all. The one message that cannot be turned off is the notice described above, because it is the message that carries the opt-out link. That is deliberate: the person receiving these messages never agreed to these terms, so the one thing we owe them is a way to stop.
“This isn’t my email” is recorded against that parent on that family, not against the email address. If the same address is also on another family record — another teacher, or a separate household you set up for a sibling — that record is unaffected and keeps sending.
What you send us
You can open a support ticket in the app, attach images, PDFs or spreadsheets, and reply by email — your reply is written back into the same ticket. That content enters the system and we read it, so the same rule applies: no ID numbers, card details or medical records in a ticket.
If you tell us what QDD should add or change, we can go and build it without asking you again and without owing you anything for it. You lose nothing by making a suggestion; this clause just means we can act on one.
Things you may not do
- Break into the service, or try to reach data that is not yours.
- Take it apart, copy it, or resell access to it.
- Scrape it, or hammer it with automated traffic.
- Use it to break the law, or to harass anyone.
- Upload anything designed to damage the service or the people using it.
- Abuse or threaten the person helping you. That closes the account immediately.
If one account’s usage runs far enough above normal to affect everyone else, we may throttle it. Unless it is urgent, we will contact you first.
What it costs
QDD is free right now. That is not a promise that it is free forever.
If we introduce paid plans, we will say so in advance, and we will not start charging an existing account without asking first. Nothing here lets us bill you for something you didn’t agree to.
Who owns what
Your records are yours. We do not claim ownership of anything you put into QDD.
To actually run the service we need your permission to do the obvious things with it: store it, back it up, process it, show it back to you, and send the messages you ask us to send. That permission is limited to operating QDD for you, and it ends when your data is deleted — the off-site backups being the one exception, described under “Ending it” below. We do not sell your records, and we do not use them to advertise to anyone.
The app itself — the software, the name, the design — stays ours.
Taking your records with you
Any time, without asking us. Settings exports your students, lessons, payments and families as an Excel workbook, covering both profiles, with a sheet showing which lessons each payment covered and another listing your saved locations. Statements and family records export separately as PDFs. You run the export from your main profile. This is not something you get as a consolation when you leave; it is there the whole time.
Worth saying what it does not cover: families you have marked inactive, your activity history, the archive of messages and statements already sent to parents, support tickets and their attachments, and your account-level notification and billing defaults are not in it. It is a copy of the records listed above, not a complete copy of your account.
Ending it
You can delete your account from inside the app whenever you like. It is deactivated immediately and permanently erased after a 30-day grace period, which is there so an accidental deletion can be undone. Deleting your account also deletes the student and family records you entered. The privacy policy has the detail.
Two things need saying plainly. First, we back up each tutor’s data to Microsoft OneDrive nightly, and an account stays in those backups throughout the 30-day grace period — so the last backup containing your records is dated around the day your account is purged. Each dated backup is kept for up to 180 days, then deleted. Deleted files then sit in Microsoft’s own recycle bin for a further 30 days before they are gone. Second, the access log described under “Who can see your records” is kept. It records what we did.
We can suspend or close an account that is breaking these terms, or being used in a way that puts other people or the service at risk. Unless the situation makes it impossible, we will tell you why and give you a chance to get your records out first.
If we ever shut QDD down, we will give you reasonable notice and a way to export your data before it goes.
What we do and don’t promise
We work to keep QDD running and correct, and we would rather hear about a problem than not — write to us. Like all software it has bugs; we work through the ones reported to us in order of how much they matter, but we do not promise every one gets fixed.
But QDD is provided as is, without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement. We do not promise it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that it will never lose data. There is no guaranteed uptime.
Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose. This is a free tool run by a very small company, and that is honest advice rather than fine print.
Finding a security problem
If you find a vulnerability, write to hello@qingdouding.com before making it public. We will reply. Poking at your own account’s data to confirm a problem is fine; going through someone else’s is not.
Limits on what we owe you
To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for lost profits, lost income, lost data, or payments a family never made to you.
For everything else, our total liability to you is capped at the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim, or US$50.
Some places do not allow these limits. Where that is true, they apply only as far as that jurisdiction allows, and nothing here takes away consumer rights you have by law.
If your use of QDD causes someone else a problem
If a claim is brought against us because of what you put into QDD, how you used it, or messages QDD sent on your behalf, you agree to cover our reasonable costs in dealing with it.
Changes to these terms
We may update these terms. If a change matters, we will update the date at the top and tell you in the app or by email. Continuing to use QDD after a change means you accept it; if you don’t, you can delete your account.
Which law applies
These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New Mexico, USA, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and disputes belong to the state or federal courts sitting in New Mexico. If you are a consumer somewhere with stronger local protections, this does not take those away.
If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.
If you got QDD from the App Store
Apple requires a few things be said plainly, and they are true:
- This agreement is between you and CrumbQuest LLC only. It is not with Apple, and Apple is not responsible for QDD or its content.
- Your licence to use QDD is personal, limited, non-transferable and revocable, and covers Apple-branded devices you own or control, under the App Store’s usage rules — including Family Sharing where it applies.
- Support is on us, not Apple. Apple has no obligation to provide any maintenance or support for QDD.
- If QDD fails to meet a warranty that applies, you can tell Apple and Apple may refund the purchase price, if any. Beyond that refund, Apple has no warranty obligation, and anything else is our responsibility.
- We, not Apple, handle any claim about QDD — product liability, a claim that it fails to meet a legal requirement, consumer protection, and any claim that it infringes someone’s intellectual property.
- You confirm you are not in a country subject to a US embargo or designated as “terrorist-supporting”, and that you are not on any US list of restricted or prohibited parties.
- You must follow any other agreement that applies to you when using QDD, such as your wireless carrier’s terms.
- Apple and its subsidiaries are third-party beneficiaries of these terms, and may enforce them against you directly.
Contact
Questions, complaints, or claims about QDD come to us here:
hello@qingdouding.com
CrumbQuest LLC, 1209 Mountain Road Pl NE, Albuquerque, NM 87110, USA