Terms, claims and sources

Terms of use

The agreement

By using automatebasics.com you agree to these terms. If you don't, please don't use the site. We may update these terms; the review date above tells you when they last changed, and continued use after a change means you accept the updated version.

What we provide

Educational content about artificial intelligence and workplace automation: written lessons, applied briefs, assessments, articles, and a certificate on completion of a certification. Course lessons, live applications and assessments are provided free of charge. There is no subscription and no recurring payment on this site.

What we don't provide

Nothing on this site is legal, financial, tax, medical, employment or other professional advice. Our content describes general practice; your situation may differ, and your employer's policies, your professional obligations and the law of your jurisdiction take precedence over anything you read here.

We do not guarantee, promise or imply any employment, job placement, promotion, salary increase, business result or other career or financial outcome from using this site or completing any certification. Any third-party research reproduced here describes a market or a study population as its publisher measured it, never a prediction about you.

Your responsibilities

You are responsible for how you apply what you learn. That specifically includes: complying with your employer's AI and data policies; not putting confidential, personal or regulated data into tools that aren't approved for it; verifying AI-generated output before you rely on it; and disclosing AI assistance where your context requires it. Our courses teach these obligations because they are yours, teaching them does not transfer them to us.

Third-party tools

Our content names third-party products. We have no control over them and no responsibility for them: their availability, pricing, terms, data handling and behaviour are matters between you and the vendor. No vendor has paid for inclusion, placement or ranking in our content. Where any commercial or affiliate relationship exists, it is disclosed on the page it appears.

Intellectual property

Course content, articles, assessments and design on this site belong to Automate Basics. You may use them for your own learning and share links freely. You may not republish, resell or redistribute the content, or use it to train a commercial model, without written permission.

Availability and liability

The site is provided “as is”. We don't warrant that it will be uninterrupted or error-free. To the fullest extent permitted by law, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss arising from use of the site. Nothing here limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited. If you are a consumer, your statutory rights are unaffected.

What the certificate means

Certificate claims are where education marketing most often overstates. Here is precisely what ours is, and what it isn't.

What it evidences

• That the assessment for that certification was sat on this account and passed. The paper is marked on our servers against an answer key that is never sent to the browser, so the result is one we produced, not one a device reported.
• The score achieved out of the total, and that it met or exceeded the pass mark published for that certification. Both numbers are printed on the certificate and returned by a verification lookup.
• The specific competencies the assessment covers, which are listed on the course page and on the verification page.
• The name given for the certificate, the certification it is for, and the date we issued it. A verification lookup returns those from our register without an account.

Issuing a certificate checks two records and no others: a passing attempt for that certification on your account, and payment for that certificate. It does not check how much of the course you read. The lessons are free, unmetered, and the first of any course is readable with no account at all; what you have read is recorded on the device you read it on, and only mirrored to us while you are signed in. Making that record a condition would deny the certificate to people who had passed the same paper as everybody else. What the certificate says about the coursework is therefore your declaration, printed as one, and not a finding of ours.

What it is not

• It is not accredited by any national qualifications authority, university, or professional regulator, and we do not claim or imply that it is.
• It does not carry academic credit and is not equivalent to a degree, diploma or regulated professional qualification.
• It is not a guarantee of employment, promotion, salary or any other outcome.
• It is not evidence that the lessons were read or that the live applications were done. The certificate carries the holder's own declaration that they were; we neither verify it nor require it before issuing.
• The live applications within each course are SELF-ASSESSED against a published rubric. We do not review, mark or moderate them. This is stated on the certificate, on the verification page, and here.
• The assessment is sat online and unsupervised. We know which account submitted the paper and we marked it; we cannot know who was at the keyboard, and we do not claim to.

Verification

Every issued certificate carries a unique credential ID which can be checked at /verify without an account. The ID is the whole input: you do not need the holder's name, because the register returns it. A check resolves the ID against our issuing register and reports the holder, the certification, the score achieved out of the total and the issue date — or that the credential has been revoked, or that nothing in the register matches. Certificates are issued by us against a passing attempt we marked, so a credential either exists in the register or it is not one.

Current pass marks

Retakes are unlimited and free. The pass mark does not change between attempts.

Pricing, refunds and your rights

What costs money

Every lesson and every practice brief on this site is free to read, with no payment details and no time limit. The first lesson of any course can be read with no account at all; reading beyond it requires a free account, which costs nothing, is not a time-limited trial and never asks for a card. The short courses carry no paid element whatsoever: they are not assessed and they issue no certificate. On the four certifications the graded assessment is also free to sit, with unlimited retakes; what you pay for is the issued certificate, and you are only asked once you have passed.

The certifications are priced individually, in USD: AIE-100 $49, AIW-200 $99, AID-300 $129, AIA-300 $149. All four together are $349. Each is a single payment. There is no subscription, no renewal and no recurring charge of any kind, and we will not introduce one on a purchase you have already made.

The prices differ because the certifications cover different scopes and levels of responsibility. Each level is assessed on its own published paper and certifies a distinct capability. The measurable differences are set out in the table above and on the pricing page, with each figure counted from the published course content.

Retakes of the assessment are unlimited and cost nothing extra. The pass mark does not change between attempts.

Refunds

You can have your money back within 14 days of purchase, provided you have not issued the certificate. Ask and it will be refunded. We will not require a reason.

The condition exists because a credential is not reversible: once one is issued in your name it carries a verifiable ID that other people may already have checked. Issuing it is therefore the point at which the thing you bought has been delivered in full.

Consumer cancellation rights

If you are a consumer in the UK or the EU you normally have a 14-day right to cancel a distance purchase. For digital content that right can end once supply begins with your consent. Our refund policy above is deliberately at least as generous as the statutory position, and nothing in these terms removes a right you have by law.

Payment handling

Payments are processed by a third-party payment provider. We never see or store your card details. Your purchase is recorded on our servers against the email address you buy with, not in your browser: it follows you to any device you sign in on, and clearing your browser data does not touch it. If you pay with an address you have no account for, you will get an email naming the address to register with, and the certificate is waiting once you do.

Prices may change for future purchases. A change will never affect a certification you have already paid for.

Claims and sources

This is the full substantiation record for the site. It is generated directly from the same file the marketing copy reads, so a claim cannot appear on a page without appearing here.

Claims we make about ourselves

Statements about Automate Basics and its courses, with the basis on which each is made.

“Join professionals learning to actually use AI at work”

Basis: A description of our intended audience, not a headcount. Automate Basics does not publish a learner or enrolment figure, and no claim about the size of our user base is made anywhere on this site. Where a figure appears in our marketing in future, the count and its measurement date will be published in this table.

“Finish able to do the work, not just talk about it”

Basis: Each certification is assessed against published, observable competencies (listed on every course page). The final exam and the live applications test those competencies directly. This is a statement about what the assessment covers. Automate Basics makes NO claim, promise, guarantee or implication regarding employment, job placement, promotion, salary, or any other financial or career outcome. Third-party labour-market statistics reproduced on this site describe the market as measured by their publishers; they are not predictions about any individual learner and are not offered as our results.

“Free to learn with a free account. Pay once for the certificate.”

Basis: All course lessons, live applications and practice material are accessible at no cost, without payment details and with no time limit, on every course and certification. Access to the first lesson of any course requires nothing at all; everything beyond it requires a free account, which is not a trial, does not expire, is never converted to a paid plan and never asks for a card. No content on this site is behind a payment. The eight short courses are free in their entirety: they carry no assessment, issue no certificate and have nothing available for purchase. On the four certifications the graded final assessment is also free to sit, including unlimited retakes and the full per-question review of every attempt; a free account is required so that the result is recorded against a person rather than a browser. The single payment buys the issued certificate and its verifiable credential ID, and is only ever requested after the assessment has been passed. Priced per certification: AIE-100 at USD 49, AIW-200 at USD 99, AID-300 at USD 129 and AIA-300 at USD 149, or USD 349 for all four. There is no subscription and no recurring charge of any kind. The price and what it buys are shown on /pricing, on each course page and at the point of purchase before any payment step. A passing result does not expire and is not withdrawn if the certificate is never bought. Refundable within 14 days provided no certificate has been issued.

“Each certification price reflects a broader scope of responsibility”

Basis: The four certifications are priced differently because they differ in depth, in assessment and in what the credential asserts. Counted from the published content: AIE-100 is 4 modules, 13 lessons, 2 live applications and a 10-question assessment, 2h 30m of material. AIW-200 is 5 modules, 15 lessons, 3 live applications and a 15-question assessment, 4h 35m of material. AID-300 is 4 modules, 15 lessons, 3 live applications and a 15-question assessment, 5h of material. AIA-300 is 6 modules, 18 lessons, 4 live applications and a 20-question assessment, 6h 30m of material. Every figure in this paragraph is generated from the course files at page-render time rather than written into the copy, so it cannot describe a version of the catalogue that no longer exists, and each is checkable against the syllabus on the course page. Time figures are content-length estimates as described in the time claim below, not a promise of individual completion time. Each certification also states on its own page the specific capability its certificate attests to; those statements are what the assessments test and nothing beyond them is claimed.

“The same 80% standard on every certification”

Basis: Every certification requires 80% of its final assessment to pass: 8 of 10 on AIE-100, 12 of 15 on AIW-200, 12 of 15 on AID-300 and 16 of 20 on AIA-300. The threshold is identical across all four, so a higher-priced certification is not passed on an easier standard: the paper is longer and covers more ground. The pass mark does not change between attempts, retakes are unlimited and cost nothing extra, and every answer is explained whether it was answered correctly or not. Assessments are marked on our server against an answer key that is never published to the browser.

“Every course names what it builds on and where it leads”

Basis: Each of the eight free short courses declares, in its published data, the certification it leads to and a statement of what that certification covers which the short course deliberately does not. Each course also declares its recommended prerequisite. Prerequisites are advisory and are never enforced: no lesson, live application or syllabus on this site is locked behind completing another course, and the interface says so wherever a prerequisite is shown. Nothing about the path requires a purchase, and the free short courses remain complete and usable on their own.

“Built for 20 minutes a day”

Basis: Every duration on this site is computed from the material at render time and none is typed in by hand: the lesson body's word count at 180 words per minute — the conservative end of the normal adult range for instructional prose — plus 25 seconds for each figure the lesson renders, plus any hands-on time the lesson explicitly asks the reader to spend on their own work. Course totals are the sum of their lessons, their live-application briefs and, on a certification, the assessment allowance of two minutes a question. Because the figures are computed, a lesson that is shortened or extended changes every duration shown for it in the same deploy, and no stated length can describe a version of the content that no longer exists. These are estimates of how much material there is, not predictions about any individual reader: nothing on this site times anybody, and the learner dashboard reports content completed rather than time spent.

“Every certificate is publicly verifiable”

Basis: Each issued certificate carries a unique credential ID resolvable at /verify. The verification page reports the credential's holder, course, issue date and the assessment standard met.

“Tool-agnostic, no vendor pays for placement”

Basis: No tool, vendor or platform named in our course content has paid for inclusion, placement or ranking. Where an affiliate or commercial relationship exists it is disclosed on the page it appears.

Third-party research quoted on this site

Every figure, with the publisher, the method, a link to the source, and the date we last verified it. None of this is our data.

If you think a claim here is wrong

Tell us and we will check it. If a figure is out of date, misattributed or wrong, we will correct or remove it and update the review date on this page. That includes the case where the publisher has since revised or withdrawn the finding.

Privacy and data

What genuinely never leaves your browser

What you write in a live application. Those briefs ask you to work on your own real job, so the text you enter is held only in your browser's local storage on the device you used, and it is never uploaded. Nobody at Automate Basics can read it, and no support request can make us produce it, because we do not have it. Your account records that a brief was completed and when; it never records what you wrote. Clearing your browser data deletes those notes and we cannot restore them.

If you read without an account, your progress does not leave the browser either. There is no row about you on our servers to sync to, and reading can stay that way for as long as you want it to.

What we hold

If you create an account we hold the email address and the name you give us, in order to operate it. From then on the lessons and briefs you have completed are synced to that account, which is the point of having one: it is how the same progress appears on your phone and your laptop. Every assessment you sit is recorded against it — the score, the answers you chose and the date — because that record is what a certificate is issued from and what a disputed result would be reconstructed from. Each issued certificate is a record too: the name printed on it, the certification, the score and the issue date. A credential a stranger can check cannot also be a thing that exists only on your laptop. If you buy one we record the purchase against the email address you bought with. If you subscribe to the newsletter we hold your address to send it, and you can unsubscribe from any issue.

Checking a credential at /verify is a request to our servers, not a calculation in your browser. It needs no account and asks for nothing but the ID itself, and like every other endpoint we run it is rate-limited and covered by ordinary request logging. What it hands back never includes the holder's email address.

What we don't do

We do not sell personal data and we do not share it with advertisers. There is no third-party analytics script, no advertising pixel and no tag manager anywhere on this site. What usage measurement we do runs against our own API from our own origin, so there is no vendor to trust with your visit and nothing here can follow you to another website.

That usage stream is deliberately thin, and these are the parts worth naming. It carries an anonymous identifier this browser mints for itself, which is meaningless on any other site and ends when you clear site data. It does not carry your IP address, your user agent, a fingerprint, a referrer or a location — those are the fields that turn an anonymous session into a person. It never carries an email address, and it is never joined to your account, your attempts or your purchases, because joining them would build a per-person browsing history we have no business holding. Page addresses are recorded without their query strings. Raw events delete themselves after 180 days.

Your rights

If you are in the UK, EU or another jurisdiction with equivalent protections, you have the right to access, correct, export and delete the personal data we hold about you, and to object to processing. Contact us and we will action it.

One limit is worth stating plainly rather than burying: deleting your account does not retract a certificate already issued in your name, because people you gave the ID to may already have checked it. Ask us to revoke it and we will, which makes it resolve as revoked rather than vanish — a credential that silently disappears is indistinguishable from a mistyped ID, and that ambiguity costs you more than it costs us. Anything held only on your device stays entirely under your control; clearing your browser storage removes it.

Contact

For questions about these terms, a correction to a claim, a data request, or anything about a certificate, contact us through automatebasics.com. We aim to respond within five working days.

These terms are governed by the laws of England and Wales, without affecting any mandatory consumer protections available to you where you live.