Generalized from real launch work. This is engineering documentation about risk structure, not legal advice; have consumer terms reviewed by counsel before relying on them.
- Consumer-protection statutes commonly void consumer waivers. In several U.S. states a consumer's waiver of the state consumer-protection act is void unless strict conditions are met (one example of the class: Texas Bus. & Com. Code §17.42 requires the consumer to have had independent counsel at purchase — never true of an app buyer). A liability cap manages a claim after it exists; it does not defeat a deceptive-practices claim arising from a false statement in the product.
- Fee-shifting makes small claims economical. Where the statute awards attorney's fees to a prevailing consumer, "the app only costs a few dollars" is not a defense strategy: the exposure is the fees, not the refund.
- Gross negligence, willful misconduct, and personal injury cannot be disclaimed anywhere in the US. Screens a user might rely on for real-world work need their own point-of-use safety notice; the only mitigations for the injury tail are structural — a liability entity and E&O insurance — not drafting.
- Binding individual arbitration + class-action waiver, with a small-claims carve-out, a 30-day email opt-out, a jury-trial waiver, and a severability clause so one struck claim does not sink the section. The class action is the scenario that can exceed a small product's lifetime value by orders of magnitude; this one section removes it.
- Accuracy of the content itself. The only control that prevents claims
rather than managing them. A disclaimer does not make a false statement
true. A small bank of independently verifiable facts can ship on technical
review; scaling the content is what requires qualified professional
sign-off. Record provenance honestly in shipped data (an explicit
professionalSignOff: falsestyle flag) rather than implying a review that has not happened. - Point-of-use disclosure. Machine-generated or machine-refined output is labelled where it appears, stating plainly which part is human-reviewed. Disclosure buried in terms is treated as weaker by regulators and stores.
- Warranty disclaimer and liability cap. Still worth having — they set expectations and cap the ordinary case — but they are the floor, not the shield.
A store-distributed EULA must also carry the platform's standard clauses: parties (the agreement is with the developer, not the platform), maintenance and support responsibility, warranty-failure refund mechanics, product-claim responsibility, third-party IP-claim responsibility, export/sanctions representations, and the platform as third-party beneficiary. Check the platform's current minimum-terms document rather than copying an old EULA.
- Nominative use is permitted: naming the exam, standard, or product you prepare people for is fine; implying endorsement is not. "Prep for the X exam" passes; "X-approved" does not.
- Carry the non-affiliation notice on every surface — app, store listing, website, ads — because it is easiest to drop in marketing copy.
- Never use the rights-holder's logos or lettermarks. Registered marks get the ® on first mention.
- No user-generated content (when true) forecloses the third-party copyright surface entirely; state it in the terms.
- No network code (when true) makes the privacy label auditable by grep instead of asserted by policy, and closes the tracking-statute surface. A zero-data privacy policy still needs its GDPR and CCPA sections — stating there is nothing to access, delete, or port is itself the compliance answer.
- Every marketed statistic traced to its primary source before it ships. An unverifiable claim on a store page or landing page is itself a consumer-protection violation.