Terms of Use

1. What Hello Deutsch is

Hello Deutsch is a German-language learning website covering CEFR levels A1 to B2 — lessons, picture vocabulary, grammar, everyday-German dialogues, exercises, a dictionary and audio, for self-study.

A substantial part of the site is free and stays free — you can use it without an account and without paying. The rest is available on a paid subscription, described in section 3. Creating an account is optional, and only needed if you want your progress to follow you between devices or you want the paid material.

2. Your account

You may create one account, with an email address you control, or by signing in with Google. You are responsible for keeping your password to yourself; if you think someone else has it, reset it immediately — that signs out every device at once.

An account is for one person. A paid account may be signed in on up to two devices at a time — typically a computer and a phone. You can see and remove your devices from your account, and moving to a new device is allowed a limited number of times in a rolling 90-day period. That limit exists to stop one subscription being shared with a class; it is not there to make ordinary use difficult, and if it ever gets in your way, write to us and we will sort it out.

We may suspend or close an account that is being used to redistribute the lessons, to share one subscription among many people, or to attack the service. Where we do, we will tell you why, and — unless the law prevents it — give you a way to respond. Closing an account does not delete your payment records, which tax law requires us to keep.

You can delete your account at any time; see the Privacy Policy for what that removes.

3. Your progress, and resetting it

Everything you finish — lessons, quiz results, your streak and your German Score — is saved to your account so it follows you between devices.

You can reset all of it at any time, from My Journey. Because this destroys work that can represent months of study, we email you a six-digit code first and you have to enter it. Once you do, your progress is erased immediately, everywhere, and the site will not show it to you again.

What we keep, and for how long. For our own operational and support purposes we retain a copy of what was erased for 365 days, after which it is deleted automatically and permanently. We tell you this because "deleted" that means "archived for a year" is not something we are willing to leave unsaid. The copy is not visible to you, is not used to restore your account by default, and does not affect the fact that your progress is gone from the product the moment you confirm.

If you reset by mistake. Write to support@hellodeutsch.com within 7 days. We will consider restoring the copy, but we do not promise to: a reset is meant to be final, and the warning and the emailed code exist so that it is a decision rather than an accident. Where we do agree, we will restore it at most three times during any one subscription period, and we may charge a reasonable fee for doing so. Requests after 7 days, or after the 365-day retention has expired, cannot be met at all — by then there is nothing left to restore.

Deleting your account is a different thing and removes more; see the Privacy Policy.

Your progress is provided as it is, and is not a backup. Your learning history, streaks, scores, unlocked lessons and saved vocabulary are a convenience, not a custodial service. We do not guarantee that any of it will be preserved, complete, accurate, exportable or recoverable, and we may reset, migrate or discontinue any of it as the site changes. Keep your own copy of anything you would be sorry to lose.

4. Subscriptions, payment and refunds

What you pay is what is shown. Prices on the plans page are shown in your own currency and, everywhere the applicable rate is known, already include tax — the figure on the card is the figure charged. In a few countries a local sales tax is settled by the payment provider and is added at checkout; where that is the case the plans page says so on the page itself, before you choose.

The currency you are charged in. Where we can take payment in the currency you were shown, we do. Where we cannot, both the plans page and the confirmation step state the exact amount and currency your card will be charged before you pay — you will never see one figure and be charged another without being told first. Your bank's exchange rate and any foreign-transaction fee are between you and your bank.

Payment is handled by Razorpay. Your card details go to Razorpay and never to us. Buying a subscription also means accepting Razorpay's terms for the payment itself.

Nothing renews itself. You buy a fixed period — 30 days, three months or a year — and that is the whole of it. No card is ever charged automatically, there is no standing mandate on your account, and no price change can reach you without you choosing to buy again. We email you before your access ends so the date is never a surprise.

Three months and a year end gently. On the three-month and yearly plans your full access continues for seven days after the paid period ends, so a period that runs out mid-lesson does not shut the course in front of you. While those seven days are running, your profile and the plans page show the date the course actually locks. This does not apply to the 30-day plan, which ends on the date shown. Nothing is charged during those seven days — as everywhere else here, no card is ever charged automatically.

Cancelling. Because nothing recurs, there is nothing to cancel: your access runs to the end of the period you paid for and then returns to the free part of the site. Your progress is never deleted — everything you have completed stays exactly where it is, and buying again restores full access immediately with nothing to restore or migrate.

If you are in the EU or EEA you normally have 14 days to withdraw from a purchase made online. Because access opens the moment you pay, checkout asks you to confirm that you want it to start straight away and that you understand you give up that 14-day right by doing so. If you would rather keep it, do not tick the box — and write to support@hellodeutsch.com.

Refunds. If a first subscription is not what you expected, ask within 7 days of that first payment and we will refund it in full. After that, and for any later purchase, we do not refund part-used periods — your access simply runs to the end of the period you paid for. This does not affect any refund right you have under the law of your own country, and it does not apply where a charge was made in error or a payment was not authorised by you: tell us and we will put it right.

What paying does and does not do. It unlocks material. It does not buy a grade, a certificate, a CEFR level or an exam result — see section 9.

A year is the longest period we sell. No plan runs beyond twelve months, and no purchase creates a standing entitlement past the period you bought. When it ends, access to paid content ends with it until you buy again.

A period is sold whole. Beyond the 7-day refund on a first purchase described above, an unused part of a period is not refunded and is not converted into credit — including where you stop using the site, close your account, or lose access through a breach of these terms. Your statutory rights are unaffected.

5. What you may do

We grant you a personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use Hello Deutsch for your own learning or teaching preparation. Under that licence you may:

• read, study and work through every part of the site, as often as you like;
• write out, by hand or by typing, any material you are studying, for your own notes;
• quote short extracts — a sentence, a rule, a word list — with credit to Hello Deutsch and a link, for teaching, review or discussion;
• link to any page on the site freely. We welcome it.

Teachers: using a lesson in your own classroom with your own students is fine and always will be. Redistributing it as a handout under your own name, or uploading it to a course platform, is not — link to it instead.

6. What you may not do

Without our written permission, you may not:

• Copy the course. Reproduce, republish, mirror, redistribute or sell the lessons, exercises, illustrations, photographs, audio recordings or the course structure, in whole or in substantial part, in any medium.
• Scrape or bulk-download it. Use crawlers, spiders, scripts, headless browsers, site-mirroring tools or any automated means to access, capture, screenshot or extract the content. Ordinary search-engine indexing that respects our robots.txt is welcome; everything else is not.
• Use it to train an AI model. The lessons, dialogues, example sentences and images may not be used as input, training data, fine-tuning data or retrieval corpus for any machine-learning or generative model. Our robots.txt refuses the known AI crawlers; this clause covers the rest.
• Defeat the protections. Circumvent, disable, or attempt to work around the technical measures described in section 5, or remove any watermark, notice or attribution.
• Pass it off as yours. Present the content as your own work, remove credit, or frame the site inside another site so it appears to be someone else's.
• Interfere with the service. Attack it, overload it, probe it for vulnerabilities without permission, or use it to distribute anything unlawful.

Security researchers: we would much rather hear from you than not. If you find a vulnerability, report it to privacy@hellodeutsch.com. Good-faith research that does not damage the service, does not access other people's data and gives us reasonable time to fix the issue will not be treated as a breach of these terms.

7. The technical protections, explained

The site carries measures against bulk copying, and we would rather describe them than have you discover them and wonder what happened:

• Printing and PDF export of lesson pages are disabled. These legal pages are not — you can and should be able to print or save the terms and the privacy policy.
• Images cannot be right-clicked, dragged or long-pressed to save, and are refused if requested directly rather than as part of a page.
• Copying is limited to short selections, so looking up a word still works while copying a whole lesson does not.
• Lesson pages are covered while the window is not in front, which frustrates automated screenshot capture.
• Each page carries a faint watermark containing a random session tag. It identifies the browsing session that rendered the page, not you — see the Privacy Policy — and it is how a leaked copy is traced back to its source.
• Automated browsers and unusually fast traversal are slowed or refused.
• Offline-copier tools are refused at the server.

None of these collect information about you. If one of them ever gets in the way of ordinary learning — or of a screen reader or other assistive technology, which they are built not to touch — please tell us and we will fix it. Accessibility wins over copy protection, every time.

8. Who owns what

The lessons, explanations, exercises, dialogues, course structure, images, audio recordings, design and the name "Hello Deutsch" are our original work and are protected by copyright. © 2026 Hello Deutsch. All rights reserved, except as granted in section 2 and as noted in section 6.

Anything you type into an exercise — your writing practice, your answers — remains entirely yours. It stays in your browser; we never receive it and claim no rights in it.

9. Third-party material and its licences

Parts of the reference material come from open projects, and we are glad to credit them. Their licences travel with them and are not affected by these terms:

The restrictions in section 3 apply to our lessons and media, not to this third-party material, which you may use under the terms of its own licence.

10. Accuracy, and what this course is not

The lessons are written and reviewed carefully, and corrected when errors are found. Even so, the site is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, and in particular:

• it is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the Goethe-Institut, telc, ÖSD, the TestDaF Institute or any other examination body, and any practice material referring to an exam format is our own preparation material;
• it does not guarantee that you will pass any examination or reach any level;
• it is not a substitute for a qualified teacher, and nothing on it is professional, legal, medical or immigration advice.

Found a mistake in a lesson? Please tell us — corrections from learners are genuinely welcome and get fixed.

11. Availability and changes

We do not promise the site will always be available, uninterrupted or free of errors. We may change, add, remove or discontinue any part of it at any time, and we may update these terms; the version and date at the top will change when we do, and continuing to use the site after that means you accept the updated terms.

We may withdraw access from anyone who breaches section 3, including by blocking automated traffic.

Downtime and maintenance. We may take the site, or any part of it, offline for maintenance, updates, migration or repair — planned or not, with notice or without. Ordinary interruptions of this kind do not entitle you to an extension of your period, a discount, a credit or a refund. Where an outage is prolonged and substantial, tell us and we will deal with it reasonably; nothing here removes a statutory remedy you have as a consumer.

12. Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any indirect, incidental or consequential loss arising from your use of, or inability to use, this site — including loss of progress data stored in your browser, which you should not treat as a backup.

Our total liability is capped at what you paid. To the fullest extent permitted by law, our aggregate liability to you for all claims arising out of or connected with the site or these terms is limited to the amount you actually paid us for the subscription period in which the claim arose — or, if you have paid us nothing, to nothing.

Events outside our control, and catastrophic loss. We are not liable for any failure or delay caused by something beyond our reasonable control, including cyberattack, unauthorised access, data corruption or destruction, failure of a hosting, payment or network provider, power or telecommunications failure, fire, flood, epidemic, war, civil unrest, strike, or an act of government. If such an event destroys the platform or its data, whether recoverably or not, our responsibility is limited as set out in this section, and we may suspend or discontinue the service.

Nothing in these terms limits any liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for gross negligence or wilful misconduct. If you are a consumer, these terms do not affect your statutory rights, and any limitation above applies only so far as the law where you live allows.

13. Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of India, and the courts of India shall have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them. If you use the site as a consumer resident elsewhere, this does not deprive you of the protection of any mandatory consumer law of your own country.

How a dispute is dealt with. Please write to us first: most things are settled that way, and we will engage with any complaint in good faith. If a dispute cannot be resolved between us, and to the extent the law that applies to you permits it, it will be referred to arbitration by a sole arbitrator in India under the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, seated in India and conducted in English, and each claim will be brought individually rather than as part of a class, group or representative action.

This does not take away a forum the law gives you. If you are a consumer, you keep every right to bring your claim in the consumer forum or court your own law provides — including, in India, the Consumer Protection Act 2019 — and this section does not apply to the extent it would remove that right. Nothing here waives a right that cannot lawfully be waived.

If any provision of these terms is found unenforceable, it is severed and the rest continues to apply.