Terms & Conditions
Last updated: March 01, 2023
To ensure that we produce the best quality work and get you that perfect result, please take note of the following terms and conditions which apply to all products and services provided by us, Hotspot Digital (Pty) Ltd:
Take Note
Certain sections of these terms and conditions have been underlined to draw your attention to them because they may:
- limit our risk or liability;
- mean that you assume risk or liability;
- mean that you indemnify us;
- be an acknowledgement of any fact by you.
Project Acceptance
Before the start of a project, you will be provided with a quotation setting out the scope of the work to be performed, an indicative timeline within which the work will be performed and our charges for the work to be performed.
A copy of the quotation is to be signed, dated and returned to us to indicate your acceptance, along with proof of your first stage payment.
The quotation is valid for 30 days.
Payment
On acceptance of the quotation, you will be sent an electronic invoice for up to 70% of the quoted charges, unless otherwise agreed upon. This amount is non-refundable, and we will only start working on your project once we have received it.
Upon completion of the project, you will be sent a final electronic invoice for the remaining amount, plus any charges for any additional work performed by us. We will not release any work to you, or go live with your website until we have received this final stage payment.
All payments are to be made by the due date of the electronic invoice via EFT or cash deposit into a bank account nominated by us. We do not accept cash or cheques, unless prior arrangement has been made.
All amounts not paid within 14 days of the date of the electronic invoice could incur interest at a rate of Prime plus 2% from the due date until the date of payment. In addition, we will be entitled to remove any of our work from any computer systems and/or suspend any services provided by us without notice to you, until all outstanding amounts have been paid in full. Such removal or suspension does not relieve you from making payment of the outstanding amounts.
All invoices include VAT at the applicable rate.
All services provided and work completed by Hotspot Digital will be invoiced.
Please note that our charges do not cover the release of our copyright design source files. You can purchase these source files at an additional cost.
Additional Work
Should you, during the project, request us to perform any work which falls outside the scope of the original quotation, you will be provided with an additional quotation setting out the scope of the additional work to be performed, an indicative timeline within which the additional work will be performed and our charges for the additional work to be performed.
A copy of the quotation is to be signed, dated and returned to us to indicate your acceptance, along with proof of your first stage payment.
The quotation is valid for 30 days.
Third-Party Services and Charges
We acknowledge that you may require the use of third-party service providers, for example, online payment processing services or additional website functinality. We will ensure that the required third party products or services are integrated into the project (if outlined and agreed to before the project commencing), but we can’t be held responsible for any issues which you may experience with the third party service provider, the products or services provided by the third-party service provider, or any problems created by the third-party products or services about our work.
To the fullest extent permissible in law, we will not be liable for, and you hereby indemnify us against, any claims, losses, damages, liability and/or costs of any kind arising out of, or in connection with, any products or services provided by the third-party service provider.
Our quotations, unless specified, exclude all third party charges. You will be responsible to pay any third-party charges, over and above our charges.
Project Timelines
An indicative timeline within which the work will be performed will be set out in the quotation. This timeline gives you an indication of when we will finish the project, but it is not binding on us.
The timeline will start running as soon as we have received the first stage payment, and is dependent on:
- third party service providers performing timeously;
- you providing us with the necessary content timeously.
Content Collection
You must provide us with all relevant information and content (written and imagery) before the start of the project. We may also request additional information and content from you during the project.
Written content must be provided to us in an editable format (i.e. either Word or Excel). Please ensure that you have checked all your content before handing it to us. Unless our quotation includes copywriting services, we will not be liable for any grammar, spelling or other content errors.
Imagery content must be provided to us via Dropbox, flash drive, and must be labelled and categorised correctly. Any images provided to us must be of good quality and size and suitable for the use it is intended. Unless our quotation includes imagery processing services, we will not be liable for any image quality issues.
You must ensure that all content provided to us:
- does not infringe any law;
- does not infringe any third party’s right, including any intellectual property rights;
- does not incite racial hatred or acts of terrorism;
- is not obscene, indecent, pornographic, offensive, defamatory or threatening.
We retain the right to not include in our work any content which we deem to not comply with the guidelines set out above. In addition, should we use any of your content in our work, and later discover that it does not comply with the guidelines set out above, we will be entitled to remove it from our work.
To the fullest extent permissible in law, you hereby indemnify us against any claims, losses, damages, liability and/or costs of any kind arising out of, or in connection with, you providing us with content that does not comply with the guidelines set out above.
All intellectual property rights in and to any content provided by you will remain with you, but you hereby permit us to use the content in respect of the project.
Reverts
Each project is allocated 3 reverts. This means that you will be entitled to request that 3 sets of reasonable changes be made at no additional cost before the project is finalised.
All requests for changes must be in writing and fall within the scope of the original quotation. Any additional changes requested, over and above the 3 allocated reverts, will be charged for at our standard hourly rate.
Should no additional requests for changes be made, we will consider the project complete once the 3 reverts have been utilised. Should you not make use of the 3 reverts within 5 working days of a request by us to do so, we will consider the project complete.
Any changes or updates requested after the project has been completed will be charged at our standard hourly rate.
Project Changes
We will not be responsible for any unauthorised charges made by you or any third parties to our work, either during the project or after the project has been completed. To the fullest extent permissible in law, we will not be liable for, and you hereby indemnify us against, any claims, losses, damages, liability and/or costs of any kind arising out of, or in connection with, any such changes.
Meetings
Should you be unable to attend a meeting which has been scheduled with us, you must give us at least 24 hours’ notice.
Websites
Please ignore these provisions if your project is not a website project.
Development:
You must provide us with all necessary access to computer systems and other locations, as required by us, to complete the website project, including the necessary read/write permissions, usernames and passwords.
ECommerce:
If you are setting up an eCommerce website, we offer a basic and limited administrative support service to help facilitate the eCommerce/merchant application. We can’t guarantee the time frame within which the application will be processed or whether it will be granted at all. You will be responsible to pay the cost of the application, over and above our charges.
Hosting:
We offer hosting services through an outsourced virtual server. While we run regular back-ups of websites that we host, and will endeavour to provide continuous service, we are unable to control the out-sourced virtual server, and as such, we are not able to guarantee continuous service and can’t accept liability for loss of service or business, whatever the cause.
Our websites are developed to certain software standards, determined by our development environment on the day of release. These standards are in place to ensure the stability of the hosting platform.
The following server software specifications are recommended:
Linux Server OS – running a version of Apache that supports PHP v8 and MariaDB 10.5 or newer.
Technical Support:
Unless agreed to in a separate monthly contract, our hosting services do not include IT, email or website maintenance support. Should these services be required a quotation will be supplied.
Billing:
You will be billed monthly / annually for our hosting service.
If your email accounts are set up with Google Workspace through Hotspot Digital, you will be billed monthly as per the current Dollar-Rand exchange on the date of Google Workspace electronic invoice submission to us.
Cancellation Policy:
Cancellation of our hosting services may be done by giving 30 days’ written notice and provided that you do not have outstanding fees with us.
On handover of any website files and hosting details, the responsibility for set-ups and redeployment of the website to its full working capacity will be the responsibility of you or your new service provider.
Website Domains
If you require us to register a website domain on your behalf, this will be done under our company name and profile for administrative purposes. The domain belongs to you and can be transferred to you if required, provided that you do not owe us any money.
Please note that we can’t guarantee the availability of a domain name.
Cancellation of a domain may be done by giving 30 days written notice and provided that you do not have outstanding fees with us.
Intellectual Property
Unless otherwise agreed by us in writing:
- all intellectual property rights in and to any work produced by us, will remain with us, and we hereby grant you a non-exclusive licence to use such intellectual property rights solely in respect of the project and not for any other purpose;
- our work may not be modified, replicated, mimicked, re-used or re-distrusted in any way or form without our prior written consent.
*This includes all open/source files for active and completed projects.
Design Credits
You hereby agree to allow us to:
- place a credit on all work produced by us, which credits the development of the work to us;
- advertise projects completed for you.
Personal Information
You hereby acknowledge that any personal information supplied to us is provided voluntarily and should you choose not to provide such information, it may not be possible for us to perform the work you requested.
You hereby consent to us processing your personal information for the purposes of performing the work you requested. We will provide sufficient technical security and organisational measures to protect the information against accidental or unlawful destruction or accidental loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure or access.
You hereby confirm that all content supplied to Hotspot Digital has been legally collated in an ethical manner in terms of the POPI Act guidelines.
No Warranties
To the fullest extent permissible in law, we do not provide any warranties of any kind, express or implied, in respect of any products or services provided by us.
General Limitation of Liability
While we endeavour to produce the best quality work, to the fullest extent permissible in law, we will not be liable for any claims, losses, damages, liability and/or costs of any kind arising out of, or in connection with, any products or services provided by us, unless caused by our gross negligence or wilful act or omission.
Without detracting from the generality of the limitation of lability set out above, it is specifically stated that we will not be liable for any claims, losses, damages, liability and/or costs of any kind arising out of, or in connection with:
- any post made by us on your behalf on any social media platform;
- changes in technology, third party threats or any other advancements or software deprecation that may materialise post project completion;
- software corruption based on security breaches, software incompatibilities due to lack of maintenance or unforeseen changes in third party software, unless a prior written agreement was reached with us to provide maintenance services to you.
General Indemnity
To the fullest extent permissible in law, you hereby indemnify us against any claims, losses, damages, liability and/or costs of any kind arising out of, or in connection with, any products or services provided by us.
Without detracting from the generality of the limitation of lability set out above, it is specifically stated that indemnify us against any claims, losses, damages, liability and/or costs of any kind arising out of, or in connection with, any post made by us on your behalf on any social media platform.
Circumstances Outside Our Control
We will not be liable for any breach of these terms and conditions, a delay in performing, or failure to perform, if such breach, delay or failure results from events, circumstances or causes which fall outside our reasonable control.
Breach
Should you breach any of these terms and conditions, and we are forced to employ the services of an attorney, advocate or tracing agent to take legal action against you, then you will be liable for all our costs incurred in this regard.
Termination
Ad hoc Projects:
You may request us to cease all work on the project by giving us 3 days written notice, which notice will be effective from the date that we received it.
Should you terminate our services before completion of the project, you will be sent an electronic invoice for all the work performed up and to the date on which we received the termination notice.
In addition to any other rights which we may have under law or these terms and conditions, we may terminate the project by giving you written notice, if you have breached these terms and conditions and remain in breach for a period of 3 working days after we have notified you of the breach.
Should we terminate the project, you will be sent an electronic invoice for all the work performed up and to the date on which we terminated the project.
Retainers:
You may request us to cease all retainer work with us by giving us 90 days written notice, which notice will be effective from the date that we received it, and provided that all accounts are in order.
Domains:
Cancellation of a domain may be done by giving 30 days written notice and provided that you do not have outstanding fees with us.
Hosting:
Cancellation of our hosting services may be done by giving 30 days written notice and provided that you do not have outstanding fees with us.
Whole Agreement
This is the whole agreement between you and us and no amendment, deletion or addition will be valid unless it is in writing and agreed to by both of us.
These terms and conditions replaces any other discussions, agreements and/or understandings between you and us regarding the subject matter of these terms and conditions.
Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy
Please refer to our Privacy Policy and Cookies Policy. You agree that they constitute part of these terms. You must read our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy before you use the Service.
If you have any questions about these Terms, please email us on support@hotspot.digital