Refund and Cancellation Policy

• Monthly plans: cancel any time with 30days’ notice. No minimum term. The month you have paid for runs to its end; part-months are not refunded.
• New subscriptions: a 14-day free trial first, so you can decide before any money changes hands.
• Once-off builds: full refund if you cancel within 7 days and I have not started. After that, you pay for the work done plus a 10% administration fee, and the rest comes back.
• If I can’t deliver: full refund within 30 days, no fee, no argument.
• If the work is defective: I fix it. That comes before any discussion of a refund.

This policy covers everything sold by SOFT DEVELOPMENT SOLUTIONS (Pty) Ltd trading as Soft Development Solutions: monthly subscriptions, once-off website and application builds, and support retainers. It forms part of the terms and conditions.

Nothing sold here is a physical product, so there is nothing to return and no returns address. “Refund” here means money paid back, and “cancellation” means ending the service or stopping the build.

All refunds are calculated and paid in South African Rand (ZAR), the currency everything was charged in.

The provision of services is subject to availability. If I cannot deliver what you have paid for — because I have taken on work I cannot complete, because a dependency the build relied on turns out to be unavailable, or for any other reason on my side — you are refunded in full within 30 days of that becoming clear.

No administration fee applies to this. The failure is mine, so the cost of it is mine.

Section 44 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 gives a consumer who buys online a right to cancel without reason and without penalty within seven days. Where that right applies to you, it applies here, and this policy does not try to take it away.

In practice I apply a 7-day cooling-off window from the day I receive your payment:

• Cancel inside that window and before work has begun, and you get a full refund.
• If you asked me to start immediately and I did, the statutory cooling-off right falls away for work already performed — that is what the Act says. I will still refund everything not yet worked for.
• On subscriptions the free trial does the same job more simply: you decide before paying at all.

Subscriptions are recurring monthly payments, so the rules for ending one need to be unambiguous.

During the free trial

Cancel at any point in the 14-day trial and you are charged nothing. There is no refund to process because no payment was taken.

After the trial

• Notice: 30 days in writing to [email protected]. The date I receive your email is the date notice starts.
• Minimum term: none - subscriptions run month to month.
• Your last billing period: the month you are currently paid up for runs to its end. If the notice period extends past that date, one further month is charged and that is the last one.
• Part-months:not refunded. Cancelling on the 3rd of a month you have paid for does not produce a refund for the remaining 27 days — but you keep full access for all of them.
• Nothing is charged after that. The recurring payment instruction is cancelled on my side when the final period ends. If you are ever charged after your final period, tell me and I refund it in full immediately.

If I put the price up

You get at least 30days’ notice of a price increase. If you do not want it, cancel before it takes effect and the 30-day notice period is waived — you are not held to a price you did not agree to.

Your data

Ask and I export your data to you in a usable format before the service ends, at no charge. It is then kept for 30 days after your final billing period and deleted. Ask for the export inside that window.

A once-off build is a fixed quote against a fixed scope, so cancellation is settled on work actually done.

• Within 7 days and before work has started: full refund of the deposit. No fee.
• After work has started: you are charged for the work completed to the date of cancellation, plus an administration fee of 10% of the total project fee. Anything you have paid above that is refunded within 30 days. If what you have paid does not cover it, I invoice the difference.
• What you get for it:whatever has been built to that point, handed over as it stands, with its source code. You do not pay for work and then not receive it — though part-finished software is, by nature, part-finished.
• After delivery and acceptance: the work is complete and the fee is not refundable. Defects are a separate matter, covered in section 8.
• If you go quiet: if a project stalls on your side for more than 60 days despite my asking for what it needs, I may treat it as cancelled and settle it on the basis above. I will write to you first and give you 14 days to respond.

The 10% fee is not a penalty. A fixed quote means I have committed time I cannot resell at short notice, and the fee covers the scheduling cost of a cancellation.

Policies like this are clearer with numbers. These use a project fee of R100 000 purely for arithmetic.

• Subscription, cancelled mid-month. You are billed on the 1st and cancel on the 10th. Access continues to the end of that month. Because 30days’ notice runs past month-end, one further month is billed and that month is your last. Nothing after it.
• Subscription cancelled in the trial. Day 9 of a 14-day trial. You pay nothing, there is nothing to refund, and access ends.
• Build cancelled before it started. You paid a 50% deposit of R50 000 and cancel four days later, before I have started. Full R50 000 back.
• Build cancelled part-way. Same R50 000 deposit. You cancel when roughly a quarter of the scope is complete, so R25 000 of work plus a 10% fee of R10 000 is R35 000. You get R15 000 back and the part-built software with its source.
• I cannot deliver. Same R50 000 deposit, and I have to withdraw. Full R50 000 back within 30 days, no fee, regardless of how much work I had done.

• Part-months on a subscription you have already been billed for - you keep access instead.
• A once-off build that has been delivered and accepted, where the complaint is a change of mind rather than a defect.
• Work completed and signed off at your request outside the original scope.
• Third-party costs already incurred on your behalf and not recoverable - domain registrations, paid API usage, message fees, paid licences. These are passed to you at cost and I will always tell you before incurring them.
• Time lost to delays on your side, where the fee covers a reserved period rather than a deliverable.

A defect means the software not doing what the agreed scope said it would. That is not a refund question first — it is mine to fix.

• On a once-off build: report it within 14 days of delivery and I fix it at no charge before the build counts as accepted. For 30 days after acceptance I fix defects in my own code at no charge.
• On a subscription: fixing defects is what the monthly fee is for, with no time limit while you subscribe.
• If I cannot fix a defect that stops the software doing what was agreed, you are refunded the portion of the fee attributable to it, and if that defect makes the whole thing unusable, the whole fee.

None of this limits any right you have under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008, where it applies to you.

• Same method where possible. A card payment is refunded to the same card through Payfast. An EFT is refunded to the account it came from.
• Timing.I process an approved refund within 7 business days of approving it. Card refunds then take your bank’s own time to show, usually a few business days.
• Currency. Refunds are paid in South African Rand (ZAR), the currency charged. I cannot control exchange-rate movement if your account is held in another currency.
• No fee to you. I do not deduct a processing fee from a refund. Where an administration fee applies under section 5, it is stated as that fee and nothing is deducted on top.

If you paid by card and believe a charge is wrong, you can ask your bank to reverse it. Please email me first. A chargeback takes weeks and costs us both time; I can usually refund a genuine error the same day.

If a charge was genuinely incorrect, I refund it without needing a dispute raised.

I may need to end an engagement — capacity, a project going somewhere I cannot take it, or a breakdown in working relationship. If I do:

• On a subscription, I give 60 days' written notice and refund the unused portion of the current paid month pro rata.
• On a build, you are refunded everything paid beyond the work completed, with no administration fee.
• Either way I export your data, hand over whatever exists, and give you a reasonable handover so you are not stranded.

The exception is termination for your material breach of the terms, where the cancellation terms in sections 4 and 5 apply as if you had cancelled.

Email [email protected]with your name, the business name, which service it concerns, and what you want to happen. That is the whole process — there is no form and no cancellation phone queue.

• I acknowledge within one business day and confirm your final billing date or refund amount in writing.
• If I think the policy gives a different outcome to the one you are asking for, I will say so with the reasoning, not simply decline.
• Complaints about how a cancellation or refund was handled go to the same address and are dealt with under section 19 of the terms.