Delivery and Fulfilment Policy

Everything sold by SOFT DEVELOPMENT SOLUTIONS (Pty) Ltd trading as Soft Development Solutions is a service or digitally delivered software. Nothing is a physical product.

• Nothing is shipped, couriered or posted.
• There are no delivery, courier, postage or handling charges, and none will ever appear on an invoice.
• There is no physical address to deliver to and no signature on receipt.
• Delivery happens electronically: access is provisioned, or software and its source code are handed over.

Subject to availability and receipt of payment, access to a subscription service is provisioned within 2 business days of the payment being confirmed.

If a free trial applies

A new subscription starts with a 14-day free trial. Trial access is provisioned within 2business days of the subscription being confirmed, with no payment required first. Billing begins when the trial ends, and access simply continues — there is no second provisioning step.

What provisioning means

• The service deployed and reachable at a URL, either on a domain you own or a subdomain I provide.
• An administrator account created for you, with a first-time sign-in link sent to the email address on your account.
• Any further user accounts you have asked for, or the ability to create them yourself.
• Hosting, SSL certificate and DNS configured.

Where a new build is involved

If the subscription includes building something that does not exist yet, the 2-day period applies to access to the service once built, not to the build itself. The build timeline is in your quote, and section 6 covers how it is tracked.

Work on a once-off build begins within 5 business days of the 50% deposit clearing, unless we have agreed a later start date in writing.

Delivery date

The accepted quote carries the delivery estimate. It is an estimate in the sense that software always is, and I will tell you early if it is moving rather than on the day it is due.

Handover

Final handover happens once the balance of the fee is paid. At that point you receive:

• The software deployed and working, at the URL agreed in the quote.
• The complete source code, either in a repository transferred to you or as an archive.
• The database schema, and any migration scripts needed to stand it up again.
• Deployment and configuration documentation - what it runs on, what environment variables it needs, how to build and deploy it.
• A list of third-party services and open-source licences it depends on.
• Administrator credentials, and transfer of any accounts created in your name.

Ownership transfers to you on payment of the final invoice, as set out in section 11 of the terms.

Delivery is confirmed by email to the address on your account. That email is your delivery confirmation and is worth keeping. It contains:

• What has been delivered or provisioned.
• The URL of the service.
• Your sign-in details, or a first-time sign-in link.
• For a once-off build: where the source code, schema and documentation are, and how to get to them.
• The date of delivery.

A tax invoice is issued separately, and shows the amount, the currency, the date and the reference for the transaction.

If you have not had a confirmation email within the periods above, check your spam folder and then email [email protected]. A delivery that has not been confirmed to you has not, as far as I am concerned, been delivered.

Stated plainly, because the two models leave you with very different things:

• On a subscription you receive working, hosted, maintained software and a licence to use it for as long as you subscribe. You do not receive the source code, and you do not own the software. You can export your data at any time and I will help you do it.
• On a once-off build you receive the software and you own it: source code, schema, documentation, and the right to modify, extend, host or hand it to another developer. Nothing is held back and there is no key I keep.

Delivery dates in a quote assume you supply content, access, credentials and decisions when they are needed. Where that is delayed, the delivery date moves by at least as long as the delay, and I will tell you in writing when that happens rather than quietly missing the date.

If a delay is on my side I tell you as soon as I know, with a revised date and the reason. If a revised date is not acceptable to you, you may cancel under the refund and cancellation policyand section 11 of it — the clause covering cancellation by me — applies, so no administration fee is charged.

I do not make up delivery dates to win work. If a date you need is not achievable, I will say so at the quote.

The provision of services is subject to availability. In cases of unavailability — where I cannot deliver what you paid for at all — you are refunded in full within 30 days, with no administration fee. This is set out in section 2 of the refund and cancellation policy.

Email [email protected]. I answer within one business day, and a client locked out of software they are paying for gets priority over everything else in the queue.

• If the fault is mine - a deployment, a configuration, a credential - I fix it at no charge.
• If the service is down, I will tell you what happened and what I have changed so that it does not happen the same way again.
• If it is something on your side, I will help you diagnose it. Time spent on faults in your own systems may be chargeable, and I will tell you before it is, never after.

There is currently no published uptime guarantee or service-level agreement: TODOdecide whether to offer an uptime SLA on hosted subscriptions, and at what level

Services are offered to clients in South Africa. Since delivery is electronic, there are no delivery areas, no excluded regions and no distance-based charges — anywhere in South Africa is the same.

Work for clients outside South Africa is by prior written agreement only, and remains priced and invoiced in South African Rand (ZAR) under South African law.

• Subscription: delivery is the start, not the end. Hosting, maintenance, updates and ongoing work continue for as long as you subscribe.
• Once-off build: you have 14 days to report anything that does not match the agreed scope, which I fix at no charge. For 30 days after acceptance I fix defects in my own code at no charge. After that you can run it yourself or put a support arrangement in place.
• Either way: your data remains yours and is exportable on request, at no charge, at any time.