Terms of Service

This is the agreement between us and the business whose website we build and host. It is written to be read — section 22 of the Consumer Protection Act requires plain language, and a contract nobody understands protects nobody.

Who you are contracting with

Registered name	Oztec (Pty) Ltd
Legal status	Private company
Registration number	2024/760008/07
Place of registration	South Africa
Directors / members	Sumish Sewnarain, Xien Singh
Physical address	Durban, ZA
Address for legal service	Durban, ZA
Telephone	0842711103
Email	info@oztec.co.za
Website	https://www.oztec.co.za
VAT	We are not currently a registered VAT vendor, so no VAT is charged and the price shown is the price you pay.
Accreditation body	None. We do not belong to an accreditation or self-regulatory body.
Code of conduct	None. We do not subscribe to an external code of conduct.
Dispute resolution scheme	None. Disputes are handled directly with us first, and thereafter in a South African court of competent jurisdiction.

Which parts of this apply to you

South African consumer law draws a hard line that most contracts gloss over, and it changes your rights, so it is worth stating up front.

• If you trade as a person — a sole proprietor, in your own name — you are a "consumer" under the Consumer Protection Act. You get the cancellation rights in section 14, the protections in ECTA Chapter VII, and everything in this contract that says "if you are a sole proprietor".
• If you are a company, close corporation or trust, section 14 of the Consumer Protection Act does not apply to you at all — section 14(1) excludes juristic persons regardless of size — and ECTA Chapter VII protects only natural persons. Your cancellation rights are the contractual ones set out below, which we have deliberately written to match the statutory ones anyway.

Where we are not sure which you are, we treat you as a consumer. Giving someone more notice than the law requires costs us little; giving them less than they are entitled to is a breach.

What we provide

ECTA s43(1)(h). For the monthly fee we:

• build a website for your business, written and designed for you, and host it;
• keep it online, patched and backed up;
• make reasonable content changes when you ask — see the service level agreement;
• run an enquiry form that emails you when someone fills it in;
• count visits and send you a monthly summary of how the site is doing;
• connect your own domain name, if you have one.

What we do not provide as part of the monthly fee: domain registration fees, paid advertising, logo design, photography, copywriting for a business we have not built the site for, or e-commerce. Anything extra is quoted separately and only starts once you have said yes in writing.

Price and payment

ECTA s43(1)(i),(j). The fee is R290 per month. We are not currently a registered VAT vendor, so no VAT is charged and the price shown is the price you pay. There is no setup fee and no build charge — the site is built before you are asked to pay anything.

• The first month is free. Billing starts a month after the site goes live under your name.
• Payment is monthly in advance, by debit order or electronic transfer.
• We may change the price with at least one calendar month's notice in writing. If you are a sole proprietor and the change is material, you may cancel without penalty — section 14(2)(c) of the Consumer Protection Act gives you that right, and we are not trying to contract out of it.

How long it runs, and how to end it

ECTA s43(1)(q). There is no fixed term and no minimum commitment. The agreement runs month to month from the day the site goes live under your name, and continues until one of us ends it.

• You can cancel at any time, by giving us 20 business days' notice in writing — email is fine. That matches the right section 14(2)(b) of the Consumer Protection Act gives a sole proprietor, and we extend it to every client rather than making you check which you are.
• There is no cancellation penalty. Because there is no fixed term and no setup fee, there is no unamortised cost for us to recover, so section 14(3) does not come into it. You pay for the notice period and nothing else.
• We can end it too, on the same notice, or immediately if you use the service for something unlawful.

ECTA s43(1)(r) — the cooling-off position. Section 44 of ECTA gives a natural person seven days to cancel an electronic transaction without reason. We do not ask you to waive it and we do not rely on the section 42(2)(d) exclusion: for the first seven days after you agree, a sole proprietor may cancel for any reason at all and owes nothing. The first month being free means you can take considerably longer than that to decide.

What happens when it ends

• Your site comes down at the end of the notice period.
• Your content is yours. Ask and we will send you every word, image and enquiry we hold for you, as files you can use elsewhere, within 1 business day(s).
• Your domain is yours, if it is registered in your name — we will point it wherever you say. If we registered it on your behalf we will transfer it to you on request at no charge.
• The design, layout and underlying software stay ours. You are not buying the platform; you are paying for a website on it.
• We delete your data 30 days after termination, except what we must keep for tax and accounting records.

What you are responsible for

• That what the site says about your business is true. We write it from your Google listing, your reviews and what you tell us, and we ask you to check it before it goes live. Claims about qualifications, registrations, licensing or guarantees are yours to stand behind.
• That you have the right to any logo, photograph or text you give us.
• That you keep to the law in how you use the site and the enquiry data it produces.
• Not using the service for anything unlawful, including anything that would be an offence under sections 2 to 8 of the Cybercrimes Act 19 of 2020.

You indemnify us against claims arising from your own content — what the site says about your business, images you supplied, and claims you asked us to make. That indemnity does not extend to anything we got wrong ourselves.

Our responsibility, and its limits

This section limits what we are liable for. Please read it before you pay anything.

We will do this work with reasonable skill and care. If we fail to, tell us and we will fix it. Where something goes wrong that costs you money, our liability for any claim is limited to the fees you paid us in the three months before the claim arose.

What that limit does not cover, because the law does not allow it to. Nothing in this agreement limits or excludes our liability for gross negligence, for wilful misconduct, for fraud, or for death or personal injury. Section 51(1)(c) of the Consumer Protection Act makes any such term void, and we are not attempting one.

Nothing here takes away a right you have under the Consumer Protection Act, ECTA or POPIA — including your right to service of a reasonable quality under section 54 of the Consumer Protection Act. The service credits in the service level agreement are our first remedy, not your only one.

We are not liable for loss caused by something genuinely outside our control: a failure at your domain registrar, a national network outage, load shedding at your premises, or your own hosting choices after you leave.

You will notice this agreement does not ask you to confirm that no representations were made to you, or to acknowledge receiving documents you have not received. Section 51(1)(g) makes those acknowledgements void, and including a void clause to see whether anyone notices is not how we want to do business.

Personal information — the operator agreement

This section is the written contract that section 21(1) of POPIA requires between a responsible party and its operator. It is here rather than in a separate document because otherwise it would never get signed.

Who is responsible for what

• You are the responsible party for everything your website's visitors send you — enquiry submissions, names, phone numbers, messages. You decide why that information is collected and what happens to it.
• We are the operator for that information. We hold it and move it on your behalf and on your instructions, and for no purpose of our own.
• We are the responsible party, in our own right, for your account with us: your contact details, billing records, and our correspondence with you.

What we undertake

• To establish and maintain the security safeguards section 19 of POPIA requires — this is the core undertaking section 21(1) asks for.
• To process your visitors' information only with your knowledge or authorisation (s20(a)).
• To treat it as confidential and not disclose it except where the law compels us (s20(b)).
• To notify you immediately if we have reasonable grounds to believe anyone has accessed or acquired it without authorisation (s21(2)). Not within a fixed number of hours — immediately, which is what the section says.
• To help you answer an access, correction or objection request from one of your customers.
• To return or delete the information when this agreement ends, as you direct.

What you undertake

• That you have your own Information Officer registered with the Information Regulator. Under PAIA section 1 that is you, or whoever heads your business — it is not something you appoint, it is something you already are. Registration is free and takes about half an hour.
• That you maintain a PAIA manual. We generate one for you from your site and publish it at /paia on your website; keeping it accurate is yours.
• That if you ever market to people who filled in your enquiry form, you comply with section 69 of POPIA. An enquiry is not consent to marketing, and someone who asked a question is not a customer within the section 69(3) carve-out.
• That if you do direct marketing, you comply with the Consumer Protection Act Amendment Regulations that came into force on 15 April 2026, including registration on the national opt-out registry where those regulations require it.

Who we use

Hosting is in South Africa, with XEE Holdings (pty) Ltd.

No personal information is transferred outside South Africa, so the restrictions in section 72 of POPIA do not arise. If that changes we will tell you before it does.

Where you switch on Google Analytics for your site, Google becomes a further processor and data leaves South Africa. That is your choice to make, in your own Google account, and the property is yours — we never hold it. Your site's privacy notice updates itself to disclose it when you do.

If there is a breach

We tell you immediately. Because you are the responsible party, the notification to the Information Regulator and to affected people under section 22 of POPIA is yours to make — but we will give you everything you need to make it, and we will help you write it.

Keeping a copy of this agreement

ECTA s43(1)(k),(m). This page is the agreement. You can print it or save it from your browser at any time, and it stays available at this address. When we change it we keep the previous version and will send it to you on request. We will email you the current version when you sign up, so you have a copy that does not depend on us.

Refunds

ECTA s43(1)(n). If you cancel within a paid month we refund the unused portion, pro rata, within 15 business days. If you cancel within the ECTA cooling-off period you are refunded in full. We do not charge a cancellation or administration fee.

General

• South African law governs this agreement; South African courts have jurisdiction.
• Notices to us go to info@oztec.co.za or to Durban, ZA.
• If a provision turns out to be unenforceable, the rest continues. Where a provision is void because a statute says so, the statute wins and we will correct the wording.
• We may change these terms with a month's notice. If a change materially affects you and you are a sole proprietor, you may cancel without penalty.