Terms and Conditions
This is the agreement between you and R5 Systems for a website on the R499 a month plan. It is written to be read, not to be got past. If anything here is unclear, ask us before you sign up and we will explain it plainly.
What is in here
- The R499 plan, and what it includes
- Who owns the website
- Paying, and what happens when a payment fails
- Hosting, your domain and your email
- Building the site, and what we need from you
- Changes and support after it is live
- Stopping the plan
- Your content, and what you are responsible for
- What we are not responsible for
- Your information
- Changing these terms, and the law that applies
- Getting hold of us
1. The R499 plan, and what it includes
You pay R499 a month. There is nothing to pay upfront and no deposit. That one amount covers all of the following, for as long as the plan is running:
- designing and building your website
- hosting it, so it is online and reachable
- one .co.za domain, registered and renewed in your name
- email addresses on that domain
- your SEO setup, so search engines can find and list the site
- a security certificate, so the site loads over https
- backups
- support, and small changes as your business moves
There is no fixed term and no lock in. The plan runs month to month from the day of your first payment. You may cancel it at any time, from your own account, and you will never owe us the months you have not used. There is no cancellation fee and no penalty.
What twelve payments buys is ownership, not release. The website becomes yours once twelve monthly payments have been made, which is set out in section 2. Stopping before then is allowed and costs you nothing further, but the site does not come with you.
What a website of yours actually contains is agreed with you before we build it. If you later want something substantially bigger than what was agreed, an online shop where there was a contact form, say, we will quote that separately and you decide.
2. Who owns the website
This is the part worth reading twice, because it is the trade at the heart of the plan. We build the site with nothing to pay upfront, and in exchange the website is ours until it is paid for.
The website remains the property of R5 Systems until twelve monthly payments have been made. Once the twelfth payment has cleared, ownership of the website passes to you and it is yours to keep, move or change, whoever hosts it after that.
Until that point, if the plan stops for any reason, whether you cancel or we suspend it for non-payment, the website comes down and stays with us. You do not owe us the remaining months, and we do not keep billing you. The site simply does not go with you.
Three things are yours from day one regardless, and we will hand them over on request whenever you ask:
- Your domain. It is registered in your name from the start.
- Your content. Your text, your photos, your logo and your price list are yours and always were.
- Your data. Enquiries, orders and anything else your site collects.
If you want to own the site before the 12 months are up, tell us. We will work out what is still owing on the build and you can settle it, and then it is yours.
3. Paying, and what happens when a payment fails
Payments are collected by PayFast, a South African payment provider. Your card details are entered on their site and never reach ours. We hold a token from PayFast that lets us charge the agreed amount, and nothing else.
Your first payment is taken when you sign up. After that you are charged on the same date each month: sign up on the 25th and you are billed on the 25th. Where a month is too short for your date, the 31st in February for instance, we take it on the last day of that month and go back to your usual date the month after.
If a payment is declined we try again the next day, and daily for seven days. We email you the first time it fails. If it has not gone through after seven days the plan is suspended: the website comes down until the account is settled. Nothing is deleted while this happens, and putting it right puts the site straight back up.
We may change the monthly amount, but not during your first 12 months, and never without telling you at least 30 days beforehand. If you do not want to pay the new amount you may cancel before it takes effect.
4. Hosting, your domain and your email
Hosting is included for as long as the plan runs. We aim to keep your site online continuously and in practice it very nearly always is, but no host anywhere is up every second of every year. Planned work happens at night and we tell you first where it will be noticeable.
Your .co.za domain is registered in your name and we renew it for you while the plan runs. If you want a .com or a premium domain that costs more than R1,000 a year, we arrange it at cost and it is quoted separately with no markup.
Email on your domain is included. It is for running your business, not for bulk or marketing sending. If a mailbox is used to send unsolicited mail we will suspend it, because the alternative is every other client's mail being treated as spam.
Backups are taken regularly and kept for a rolling period. They exist so we can put things right after a failure. They are not an archive service, so do not treat them as your only copy of anything that matters to you.
5. Building the site, and what we need from you
After your first payment you fill in your business information: a short set of questions about what you do, who your customers are and what the site has to achieve, plus any photos or a logo you already have. We cannot start until that is in, because until then we do not know what we are building.
We will come back to you if anything needs clearing up, show you the site before it goes live, and make the changes you ask for. How long a build takes depends mostly on how quickly we hear back from you. Where a date matters to you, tell us at the start and we will say honestly whether it is achievable.
If we do not hear from you for 60 days while a build is in progress, we will pause it and email you. Your plan keeps running during a pause, because the hosting, the domain and the email are still there.
6. Changes and support after it is live
Small changes are part of the plan: new prices, updated hours, a few photos, a paragraph reworded, a staff member added or removed. Ask and we do it.
Something substantially bigger, a new section of the site, a booking system, an online shop, is a new piece of work. We will tell you before we start and quote it, so nothing arrives as a surprise on an invoice.
Support is by email and WhatsApp during business hours. We answer quickly. If your site is down we treat it as urgent whatever the hour.
7. Stopping the plan
You can cancel at any time from your account, under Your plan. Cancelling stops the next debit. You keep the month you have already paid for, and the site stays up until the end of it.
If you cancel before twelve payments, the website and the hosting both stop and the site goes offline, because it has not been paid for yet and remains ours until it is. You are told this plainly, on screen, before the cancellation goes through. You will not owe us the remaining months, and there is no penalty for leaving.
If you cancel once twelve payments are in, the website is yours. We will hand over the files and help you move it to wherever you would like it hosted. Hosting, the domain renewal, email and support end when the plan does, because those cost money every month whoever owns the site.
We may suspend or end the plan if a payment has not been settled after seven days of trying, if the site is used for anything unlawful, or if it is used in a way that puts other clients on the same server at risk. Except where something unlawful is involved, we will always contact you first and give you a chance to put it right.
8. Your content, and what you are responsible for
Everything you give us to put on the site stays yours, and you give us permission to use it for the purpose of building and running your site.
You are responsible for having the right to use what you send us. If you supply photographs, logos, text or music that belong to somebody else, that is a problem you carry and not one we can carry for you. If we are told something on your site infringes somebody's rights we will contact you and, where we have to, take it down until it is sorted out.
What goes on the site has to be lawful and honest. No stolen material, nothing designed to deceive, nothing that breaks South African law.
Keep your account password to yourself. Anything done from your account is treated as done by you. If you think somebody else has your password, change it and tell us.
9. What we are not responsible for
We build and run your website properly and we stand behind that work. There are limits to what anybody can reasonably promise, and they are these.
We do not promise particular business results. A website is a tool. We cannot promise a number of enquiries, a position in Google's results, or a level of sales, and you should be wary of anybody who does.
We are not liable for losses caused by things outside our control: your domain registrar, a payment provider, an internet outage, a supplier failing, or a third party service your site depends on changing or closing.
Where we are liable, our liability to you is limited to the amount you have paid us in the 12 months before whatever went wrong. Nothing in these terms limits liability for anything that cannot lawfully be limited, including fraud, or death or injury caused by negligence.
Nothing here takes away rights you have under the Consumer Protection Act or any other South African law. Where these terms and that law disagree, the law wins.
10. Your information
What we collect, why we collect it and what we do with it is set out in our Privacy Policy, which covers our obligations under POPIA. In short: we hold what we need to run your account and build your site, we do not sell it to anybody, and you can ask us for a copy or ask us to delete it.
If you delete your account, your details, your business information and your uploaded files go with it. Records of payments are kept, because we are required by law to keep financial records for five years.
11. Changing these terms, and the law that applies
We may update these terms. Where a change actually affects you we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and you may cancel before then if you do not accept it. Small corrections, a clearer sentence or a fixed typo, we simply make.
This agreement is governed by South African law, and the courts of South Africa have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from it.
If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, the rest carries on unaffected.
Before anybody goes near a court, talk to us. Almost everything is solved by a phone call, and we would far rather have the call.
12. Getting hold of us
Riot 5 Systems (Pty) Ltd, trading as R5 Systems
Email info@r5systems.co.za
WhatsApp 079 925 7395