The short version: Ask Mallard is a research-planning aid, not professional advice. Use good judgment, don't paste patient records, and verify everything before you rely on it.
Please read this first. Ask Mallard helps you plan and interpret research methods. It is not a substitute for a qualified statistician, your IRB, or clinical, statistical, regulatory, or legal judgment, and it is not a medical device. Everything it produces is a starting point you are responsible for checking. By using Ask Mallard you agree to these Terms.
These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of Ask Mallard (the "Service") at askmallard.com. By accessing or using the Service, you agree to these Terms and to our Pricing and Privacy Notice. If you do not agree, do not use the Service. If you use the Service on behalf of an organization, you represent that you are authorized to accept these Terms for it.
The Service turns a plain-language study description into a study plan: a recommended analysis, a power and sample-size approach with an interactive calculator, an editable causal diagram, a methods paragraph, illustrative tables and figures, a background and literature scan, statistical code and point-and-click steps, a budget sketch, and a read on likely research oversight. These outputs are educational and planning aids.
The Service does not provide professional statistical, medical, regulatory, or legal advice, and — except as described in section 8 — does not create any professional relationship. It is not a substitute for a qualified biostatistician, your Institutional Review Board (IRB) or ethics committee, or independent review. You are solely responsible for the design, conduct, analysis, and reporting of your research, and for obtaining the appropriate approvals.
Outputs are generated by an automated AI model and may be incomplete, outdated, or wrong — including recommended tests, sample-size figures, code, citations, and oversight reads. Illustrative tables, figures, and worked numbers use invented placeholder data for format only. The literature scan is an automated relevance search, not a systematic review. Power and sample-size results are planning estimates computed from the assumptions you or the model supply; changing those assumptions changes the answer. Verify every output against primary sources and qualified human review before relying on or publishing it. If you use AI-assisted content in a manuscript or protocol, disclose it per the relevant journal, funder, and institutional policies.
Do not submit protected health information (PHI) or otherwise identifiable patient data to the Service, and do not include it in anything you send us for review under section 8. Describe your study in de-identified terms — populations and variables, not names or records. You are responsible for ensuring your inputs comply with HIPAA, GDPR, your data-use agreements, and any other law or policy that applies to you.
You can use the free tier without an account. If you create one, authentication is handled by Clerk, and you are responsible for keeping your credentials secure and for activity under your account. You must provide accurate information, be at least 18 years old (or the age of majority where you live), and be able to form a binding contract in your jurisdiction.
You can delete your account at any time from the Account tab. Deletion removes your sign-in account, your saved plans, your usage history, and any API key remaining from the retired bring-your-own-key feature, and cannot be undone — export anything you want to keep first. Deleting your account does not by itself cancel a paid subscription; cancel that separately through the payment portal (section 6).
Ask Mallard never sees or stores your card number — Stripe processes payments directly under its own terms.
Ask Mallard previously let you connect your own Anthropic API key instead of using a paid plan. That option has been retired. All plan generation now runs on our managed service under the plans in section 6. If you synced a key while the feature existed, it is no longer used for anything — you can remove it from the Account tab, and deleting your account removes it as well.
We may offer optional, paid human services — a written review of a study plan by a qualified biostatistician, and live one-on-one consultations. These services are not currently offered for general sale on the site. When they are offered, or when an engagement is arranged directly with us, they are advisory professional services and the following applies to them:
You agree not to: use the Service unlawfully or to submit unlawful content; submit PHI or identifiable patient data; attempt to disrupt, overload, reverse-engineer, scrape, or circumvent rate limits or access controls; share or resell account access; or present its outputs as peer-reviewed, validated, or as professional advice. We may suspend or terminate access for misuse.
You retain ownership of the study descriptions you enter and of the plans generated for you, and you are free to use them in your own research, proposals, and publications, subject to these Terms. If you save plans to your account, you grant us permission to store and transmit them solely to operate the Service for you; we delete them when you delete your account or the plan. Ask Mallard and its name, design, and software remain the property of its operator; these Terms grant you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable right to use the Service, and no other rights.
| Anthropic | Drafts plans from your consult text, and reviews them. |
| OpenAI | Reviews plans a second time, independently of the model that drafted them. |
| Clerk | Handles sign-in and account identity (if you create an account). |
| Stripe | Processes subscription and one-time payments. |
| Netlify | Hosts the site, serverless functions, and account storage. |
| NCBI / PubMed | Provides the literature-search results shown in the background section. |
| PostHog | Privacy-first product analytics, where enabled. See the Privacy Notice. |
We also keep limited technical error logs to diagnose failures. Your use of these services through Ask Mallard is also subject to each provider's own terms. We are not responsible for third-party services.
The Service is provided "as is" and "as available," without warranties of any kind, express or implied, including fitness for a particular purpose, accuracy, and non-infringement. We do not warrant that outputs are correct or that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free.
To the fullest extent permitted by law, Ask Mallard and its operator will not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, or for any loss arising from your reliance on the Service or its outputs — including research decisions, analyses, submissions, or publications. Our total liability for any claim relating to the Service will not exceed the greater of the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim or US $50. Nothing in these Terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law.
You agree to indemnify and hold harmless Ask Mallard and its operator from claims, losses, and reasonable costs arising out of your misuse of the Service, your violation of these Terms or applicable law, your submission of data you were not permitted to submit, or your use of outputs in your research or publications.
We may modify the Service or these Terms. If we make material changes to these Terms, we will post the updated Terms here; continued use after a change means you accept the revised Terms. We may suspend or end the Service, or your access to it, at any time.
These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, United States, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules, and you agree to the exclusive jurisdiction of the state and federal courts located there, except where applicable law provides otherwise.
If any provision of these Terms is held unenforceable, the rest remain in effect. Our failure to enforce a provision is not a waiver of it. You may not assign these Terms without our consent; we may assign them in connection with a transfer of the Service. These Terms, together with the Privacy Notice, are the entire agreement between you and us about the Service.
Questions about these Terms? Email hello@askmallard.com.
