Terms of Use

These terms govern your use of solfalabs.com — this website and nothing else. They are an agreement between you and Solfa Labs, and you accept them by using the site. Any software Solfa Labs releases will carry its own separate licence; nothing on this page grants you rights to any software or describes how any software behaves.

A note on the difference between this page and the Privacy Policy, because the two are routinely confused. The Privacy Policy is a disclosure: a statement of fact about what we do with information about you, required by law and enforceable by a regulator. This page is an agreement: the rules under which you may use the site, what we promise about it, and who carries the risk if something goes wrong. You should read both.

These terms are an agreement between you and Solfa Labs, a software company incorporated in the Republic of South Africa and based in Bloemfontein, Free State. "We", "us" and "our" mean Solfa Labs. "You" means the person using the site. "The site" means solfalabs.com and every page served from it.

Correspondence about these terms goes to hello@solfalabs.com. Correspondence about personal information goes to privacy@solfalabs.com and is dealt with under the Privacy Policy.

You accept these terms by using the site. There is no button to click, because browsing a public web page is itself the act of use and pretending otherwise would be a fiction.

You accept them a second time, explicitly, when you tick the consent box on the waitlist form — that box states that you accept these terms and the Privacy Policy, and the form will not submit without it.

If you do not accept them, do not use the site. That is a complete remedy: there is no account to close and nothing of yours held here.

Anyone may read it. You must be 18 or older to join the waitlist, for the reasons set out in §15 of the Privacy Policy.

By submitting the form you confirm that you are 18 or older, that the address you entered is yours or that you are authorised to use it, and that you are legally capable of entering into a binding agreement.

Without asking us:

• Read every page, as often as you like, from anywhere.
• Link to any page here from anywhere, including from commercial sites.
• Quote reasonable extracts with attribution for review, criticism, reporting, research or private study — fair dealing under section 12 of the Copyright Act 98 of 1978.
• Save or print pages for your own reference, and share a link with anyone.

Several of these are criminal offences, and the provisions are named so you can see we are not inventing them.

5.1 Security research

The prohibition on probing is not meant to deter people acting in good faith. If you believe you have found a vulnerability, write to privacy@solfalabs.com before testing anything intrusive. We respond within 72 hours, we will not threaten you with legal action for a good-faith report, and we will credit you if you want the credit. In return: do not access anyone else's information, do not degrade the service for others, and give us a reasonable chance to fix the problem before publishing.

The waitlist is a mailing list. Joining it puts your email address on that list, once you confirm it by clicking a link we send you, so that we can tell you about the product's progress and its release.

It does not create an account. It costs nothing and creates no payment obligation. Being on the list is how you are invited to the beta, but places may be limited and inclusion is not a guarantee. One click in any message removes you.

We may remove any address at any time — one that is bouncing, one that appears to have been entered by someone else, or one used to abuse the form. Removal is not a penalty and does not prevent you rejoining. We may also close or replace the waitlist at any time; anyone already on it stays on it.

This site describes software that has not been released. Everything on it about capabilities, platforms, timing and pricing is a statement of present intention, not a promise.

• Any date given is an estimate. If it moves, we will say so rather than quietly change it.
• Anything described may change substantially, arrive later than the rest, or not ship at all.
• Illustrations and animations on this site are representations of work in progress. The finished product will not look exactly like them.
• Nothing on this site is an offer capable of acceptance, and nothing on it forms part of any contract for the supply of software.

We say this not to reserve the right to disappoint you, but because writing marketing copy that reads as a guarantee and then failing to meet it is how people end up feeling lied to. If something changes materially, the people on the waitlist will hear it from us.

Everything on this site — the text, the layout, the illustrations, the animations, the code, the design and the arrangement of it all — is owned by Solfa Labs or used with permission, and is protected by the Copyright Act 98 of 1978 and its equivalents elsewhere.

These terms grant you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable and revocable licence to access and view the site. That licence does not include any right to copy or republish it beyond the fair dealing described in §4; to adapt, translate or make a derivative work of it; to extract its design, code or assets for another project; or to use any of it to train a machine learning model or build a dataset. All rights not expressly granted are reserved.

The Solfa Labs name, the swan mark, the wordmark and the names of products described here are trade marks of Solfa Labs, whether or not registered — unregistered marks are protectable in South Africa through passing off, so the absence of a symbol is not an absence of rights. You may use them to refer to us, which needs no permission. You may not use them in a way that suggests we endorse or are affiliated with you, or incorporate them into your own name, logo, domain or application.

Marks belonging to other companies that appear here are the property of their owners and are used descriptively. If you want to use something for a purpose this section does not permit, ask at hello@solfalabs.com. The answer is often yes.

We link to something because we think it is useful at the time, and that is the extent of it. We do not control any linked site, we do not endorse its content or its privacy practices, and we are not responsible for anything on it or for any loss arising from your use of it. Following a link takes you outside this site, and this document and our Privacy Policy stop applying at that boundary.

If a link here is broken or leads somewhere it should not, tell us at hello@solfalabs.com and we will remove it.

If you email us a suggestion, an idea or any other feedback, you grant us a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free licence to use it in developing our products, without obligation or attribution. You are not entitled to payment or credit. We may already be working on the same idea, or have received it from someone else, and nothing you send creates a confidential relationship or restricts what we may build. You confirm that anything you send is yours to send.

This is not a land grab. It is the standard arrangement precisely because the alternative is unworkable: without it, a company that receives an unsolicited idea and later ships something similar — having conceived it independently — is exposed to a claim it cannot disprove. Most companies respond by refusing to read unsolicited suggestions at all. We would rather read yours.

Please do not send us anything confidential. If you have something genuinely confidential to discuss, write and ask first.

We make no promise that the site will be available at any particular time or for any proportion of the time, and there is no service level agreement here. We may modify, suspend or discontinue the site or any part of it at any time. We will give notice of planned interruptions where that is practical, and we will not take the waitlist offline without saying so.

To the fullest extent permitted by law the site is provided as is and as available, without warranties of any kind, express, implied or statutory. In particular we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, timely, secure or error-free; that the information on it is complete or current, given that it describes work in progress; that any defect will be corrected; or that the site or its server is free of harmful components. Any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose or non-infringement is excluded to the extent the law allows.

This is subject to §14. Some of these exclusions cannot lawfully be applied to a consumer in South Africa, and to that extent they do not apply to you.

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Solfa Labs is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive loss, or for any loss of profit, revenue, data, goodwill or anticipated saving, arising out of or in connection with this site — whether the claim is framed in contract, delict, statute or otherwise, and whether or not we were told such loss was possible.

Where liability cannot be excluded, our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with this site is limited to R1,000 (one thousand rand).

That figure reflects what this site is: a free informational page that takes no money from you, holds nothing of yours beyond an email address you can delete at will, and provides nothing you could rely on to your detriment.

12.1 What is never excluded

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence; for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation; for gross negligence or wilful misconduct; for any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008; or for any obligation under the Protection of Personal Information Act, which is governed by the Privacy Policy and is not limited by this document.

These exclusions are stated plainly rather than buried, because a limitation clause that tries to exclude the unexcludable tends to be struck down in its entirety — and because you are entitled to know where the floor is.

You agree to indemnify Solfa Labs against any claim, loss, damage or cost — including reasonable legal costs — arising from your breach of these terms, your unlawful use of the site, or your infringement of anyone else's rights through it.

This does not apply to ordinary, lawful use. Reading these pages, joining the waitlist and emailing us cannot trigger it. It exists for the person who uses the form to harass someone, attacks the server, or republishes the site as their own.

If you are a consumer, the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 gives you rights no contract can take away. This section exists because a terms document that quietly attempts to override the CPA is both unenforceable and dishonest.

• Section 48 prohibits terms that are unfair, unreasonable or unjust. If any clause here is found to be such, it falls away and the rest survives.
• Section 49 requires that any term limiting risk or liability, or imposing an indemnity, be drawn to your attention in plain language and conspicuously. That is why §11, §12 and §13 are separate numbered sections with headings that say what they are.
• Section 22 requires plain language. If any part of this document is unclear, ask and we will explain it and then rewrite it.
• Section 11 gives you the right to refuse direct marketing, dealt with in §14 of the Privacy Policy.
• Nothing here limits your rights under the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002.

Where these terms and a right you hold under South African consumer law conflict, the law wins and we do not intend otherwise.

Material changes — a new restriction on you, a change to the liability limit, or a change to §6 or §10 — are announced by email to everyone on the waitlist at least 30 days before they take effect. Corrections and clarifications take effect when published. Superseded versions are archived and provided on request, so you can establish what applied at any given time.

Continuing to use the site after a change takes effect means you accept it. If you do not, stop using the site and unsubscribe — a complete remedy here, because nothing of yours is held hostage by it.

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa, without regard to its conflict of law rules. You and we consent to the jurisdiction of the South African courts, and specifically to the Free State Division of the High Court sitting in Bloemfontein, or to the Magistrate's Court having jurisdiction where the claim falls within its limits.

This does not deprive you of the protection of consumer law in your own country. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere and the mandatory law of your country gives you the right to bring proceedings there, this clause does not take it away.

If you have a complaint, write to hello@solfalabs.com setting out the problem and what would resolve it. We will reply within 14 days and engage with it properly. If that does not resolve it and you are a consumer, you may refer the matter to the National Consumer Commission or to a court. Nothing in this section requires you to arbitrate, waives your right to a court, or prevents you joining a class action — clauses that do those things are common in terms documents and we have deliberately not included one.

Entire agreement

These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between you and us about this site, and replace anything said before. This does not exclude liability for any fraudulent statement.

Severability

If any provision is unlawful or unenforceable it is severed and the rest continues. Where a provision can be saved by reading it more narrowly, it is to be read that way rather than struck out.

No waiver

If we do not enforce a term on one occasion, that is not a waiver and we may enforce it later.

Assignment

You may not transfer your rights under these terms. We may transfer ours to a successor of our business, on notice to the waitlist.

No agency

Nothing here creates a partnership, joint venture, employment or agency relationship.

Third parties

Nobody who is not a party to these terms has any right to enforce them.

Force majeure

Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something genuinely outside our reasonable control, including power or network failure, the failure of a supplier we depend on, natural disaster, or a government act.

Electronic communications

The Electronic Communications and Transactions Act gives legal effect to agreements formed electronically. Communicating with us by email or through this site satisfies any legal requirement that a communication be in writing, and a data message is received when it becomes capable of being retrieved, per ECTA s 23. We are not obliged to act on any communication we reasonably believe to be fraudulent or sent by someone other than the person it claims to be from.

Language and interpretation

These terms are written in English; any translation is for convenience and the English governs. Headings are for navigation. Words importing one gender include the others, the singular includes the plural, and "including" means "including without limitation". No provision is to be construed against us merely because we drafted it.