Terms of service

Who this agreement is with

These terms are an agreement between you and Dr Xu-Priour EI, trading as XP Consulting (SIREN 805 379 138), established in France. They cover the services you buy on this site. An institution buying against a purchase order receives a scope of work, which takes precedence where the two differ.

If you buy as an individual, we treat you as a consumer, whoever pays. Consumer law gives you rights these terms cannot remove, and nothing in them limits those rights.

These terms exist in English and in French. If you are a consumer living in France, the French version prevails where the two differ.

What we provide

Diagnostic and advisory services for academic work: reading a submission against the criteria that will decide it, ranking what we find, and helping you plan what to do about it. Everything we produce is addressed to you and describes your work.

We do not supply intellectual content that goes out under your name: the argument, the abstract, the literature review, the grant narrative, the response to reviewers or the teaching statement. Where you buy The Language Pass, we edit language, structure and clarity in text you wrote, record every change in a change log delivered with the report, and tell you what to put in the acknowledgements. This is a term of the agreement and not merely a policy: a request that would cross from advising into authoring is declined in writing.

What we do not do, at any price

• Write any part of a manuscript, thesis, application, cover letter or response to reviewers.
• Edit a thesis or coursework beyond what your institution permits in writing.
• Sell or arrange authorship, or suggest citations for the purpose of influencing a metric.
• Contact an editor, reviewer, panel member or examiner on your behalf.
• Guarantee acceptance, funding, a grade or an outcome. Nobody can, and we will not imply otherwise.
• Accept work where the person instructing us is not the person who will be named as author.

Prices and tax

Prices are in euros, and the price shown is the price you pay. No VAT is added: TVA non applicable, art. 293 B du CGI.

If your bank converts the amount into another currency, the converted figure is your bank’s, not ours.

Payment, authorisation and capture

For one-off services your card is authorised at checkout and captured only once we have confirmed the service is the right instrument for your work. Until then the amount is held on your card but not taken. A hold lasts about seven days; if we have not confirmed fit by then, we release it and ask you to authorise again before any work starts.

Subscription services bill monthly from the date billing starts, with any minimum term stated on the page you bought from.

Institutions can be invoiced against a purchase order instead of paying by card. Payment terms, tax documentation and a data processing agreement are supplied as part of procurement.

Your right to withdraw

If you are a consumer, you can withdraw from a contract for a service within 14 days of the day you made it, without giving a reason.

Most of our services are delivered inside those 14 days. We start before they end only if you ask us to in writing and acknowledge that you lose the right to withdraw once the service has been fully delivered. You make that request by ticking a box at checkout, and you can ask us to wait the 14 days instead.

If you withdraw before we start, everything is refunded. If you withdraw after asking us to start, you pay for the part of the service already performed, in proportion to the whole, and the rest is refunded. Refunds go to the card you paid with, within 14 days of your notice.

To withdraw, use “Withdraw from your contract here” at the foot of every page of our site, which emails you a dated copy straight away. Or email contact@xp-consulting.org with the subject “Withdrawal”. Any clear statement is enough, and you can use this model form if you prefer:

• To: Dr Xu-Priour EI, trading as XP Consulting, contact@xp-consulting.org
• I hereby give notice that I withdraw from my contract for the provision of the following service: [the service you ordered]
• Ordered on: [date]
• Name: [your name]
• Date: [today’s date]

Refunds, guarantees and the pause right

The guarantees published on our guarantee page form part of this agreement, in the version published on the day you bought. In summary: a full refund or a credited rescope, at your choice, where the service turns out not to fit your work, raised within 24 hours of the pre-brief and before work starts; after delivery, where the work does not meet the brief agreed before it started and you tell us within 14 days of delivery, one free revision, and if the revised work still does not meet that brief, half the fee refunded or credited, at your choice (on the first month of Dissertation Finisher, half of that month refunded and the right to end the engagement with no further months charged); a free session where a mock defence does not produce the written list of likely questions and answers it promises, and on Intensive a free second round; and one no-penalty pause per commitment period on a multi-month engagement. Where this summary and the guarantee page differ, the guarantee page applies.

Where we have broken one of our published integrity commitments, the engagement is refunded and you do not have to argue for it. If the specialist cannot deliver the work, for any reason, any part not delivered is refunded.

Confidentiality

Everything you send us is confidential. We use it only to deliver your engagement, show it only to the specialist assigned to it and to the AI services named in your report, never let it be used to train, fine-tune or evaluate any model, and delete uploaded files on the schedule in our privacy policy. These are terms of this agreement, so you can enforce them, not only read them.

Your responsibilities

You confirm that the work you send is yours to send, that you are the author or an authorised co-author, and that sharing it with us breaches no agreement you are under, with a funder, a publisher, an employer or a collaborator.

You are responsible for declaring the support you received where your institution or publisher requires it. We publish our commitments precisely so you can quote them accurately, and we will help you word a declaration if you ask.

Do not send us personal data about third parties that we do not need. If your work contains data about research participants, send it de-identified. Course engagements are designed to require no student personal data at all.

Intellectual property

Your work remains entirely yours. We claim no rights in it and acquire none by reading it.

The reports, maps and materials we produce are licensed to you for your own use, including submitting them as part of a promotion or tenure file. Our frameworks and templates remain ours.

Ending an engagement

You can cancel a subscription at any time from the billing link in any receipt, which opens our payment provider’s portal. No account is needed. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the period already paid for, subject to any minimum term stated when you bought. One-off engagements end when the work is delivered.

We may end an engagement where continuing would require us to breach a published commitment, where the relationship has become abusive, or where we conclude we are not the right people for the work. In every case, fees for work not yet delivered are refunded.

Liability

We provide advice and diagnosis. Decisions about your work, your submissions and your career remain yours, and we do not promise acceptance, funding, a grade or any other outcome: those decisions belong to editors, panels and examiners.

If you are a consumer, our liability to you is the liability the law sets, and nothing in these terms reduces it.

For an institution, our total liability for an engagement is limited to the fees paid for it, except for gross negligence or wilful misconduct, which no clause excludes.

Changes, disputes and governing law

We may update these terms. The version published on the day you bought applies to that purchase.

If something goes wrong, write to us first and you will get a written answer within two working days. As a consumer you can also refer a dispute, free of charge, to a consumer mediator. We are completing our registration with one and will name it here.

These terms are governed by French law. If you are a consumer living in another country, you keep the protection of the mandatory rules of the country where you live.

If any part of these terms is found invalid, the rest still applies. These terms, the guarantee page and the page you bought from are the whole agreement between us, and we will not transfer it to anyone else without your consent.