Terms of Service

Thank you for using Pinion CRM! We build it to help small businesses do their best work with the least possible friction. Because we can't know every one of our customers personally, we have to put some Terms of Service in place to keep the ship afloat.

When we say “Company”, “we”, “our”, or “us”, we mean Propagated Gradients (Pty) Ltd (registration number 2024/567783/07), a private company registered in South Africa, trading as “Pinion CRM”. Our full company details, addresses, and the disclosures required by section 43 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 (“ECTA”) are published on our company & legal information page.

When we say “Services”, we mean our website pinioncrm.com and the Pinion CRM application, whether used in a web browser or in any other form we deliver it. When we say “you” or “your”, we mean the person or organization that owns an account on the Services, including every user in that account.

By creating an account or using the Services, you agree to the latest version of these Terms, our Privacy Policy, and our Refund & Cancellation Policy. We may update these Terms in the future; when we make a significant change we will refresh the date at the top of this page and take appropriate steps to notify account holders, such as emailing the account owner. If we don't exercise or enforce a right or provision of these Terms, that isn't a waiver of it. These Terms contain a limitation of our liability — see the Liability section below.

You can access these Terms at any time at pinioncrm.com/terms, and you can store and reproduce them by saving or printing this page. We recommend you keep a copy.

Account terms

1. You are responsible for maintaining the security of your account and password, and for making sure your users do the same. We cannot and will not be liable for any loss or damage arising from your failure to keep your credentials secure.
2. You may not use the Services for any purpose listed in the Use Restrictions section, and you may not permit any of your users to do so either.
3. You are responsible for all content posted to, and all activity that occurs under, your account — including content posted by and activity of every user in your account.
4. You must be a human. Accounts registered by bots or other automated methods are not permitted.
5. You must be 18 years or older to hold an account.

Payment, refunds, and plan changes

1. If you are on the Free plan, it is really free: we do not ask for your card details and — just like for paying customers — we do not sell your data.
2. Paid plans are billed monthly, in advance, in South African Rand, by debit or credit card through our payment processor, Paystack. Your subscription runs month to month with no minimum duration — you can cancel at any time.
3. The prices shown on our pricing page are the full price payable. No VAT is added: Propagated Gradients (Pty) Ltd is not currently a registered VAT vendor. If that changes, we will give existing customers at least 30 days notice of any price effect.
4. Access to your paid plan starts immediately when your payment succeeds. When you upgrade from the Free plan, we charge your card immediately and your billing cycle starts on the day of the upgrade.
5. A record of every transaction is available to the account owner in the app under Settings → Billing, where you can view your receipts at any time. Keep these, together with a saved copy of these Terms, as your record of the transaction.
6. We process refunds according to our Refund & Cancellation Policy, which includes a 30-day money-back guarantee on your first payment.

Cancellation and termination

1. You can cancel your paid plan yourself, at any time, from the secure billing page linked in Settings → Billing — no phone calls, no questions asked. When you cancel, you keep full paid access until the end of the period you've already paid for, you won't be billed again, and your organization then moves to the Free plan. Nothing is deleted when you downgrade: your data stays readable, subject to Free plan limits, for as long as your account exists.
2. If you want your data gone, you can ask us to delete your account by emailing [email protected] from the account owner's address. Deleted account content is permanently removed from our active systems within 30 days and from any backups held by our hosting providers within 60 days. We cannot recover content once it has been permanently deleted, so export anything you want to keep (for example, invoice PDFs) before asking us to delete.
3. We have the right to suspend or terminate your account and refuse any current or future use of the Services if you breach these Terms, including the Use Restrictions below. Verbal, physical, written or other abuse of anyone working on Pinion CRM will result in immediate account termination.

Modifications to the Services and prices

1. We are constantly improving the Services. Sometimes it becomes technically impossible to continue a feature, or we redesign part of the Services because we think it could be better. We reserve the right to modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, any part of the Services with or without notice.
2. If we change the price of a plan you are on, we will give you at least 30 days notice by email to the account owner's address before the new price takes effect.

Uptime, security, and privacy

1. Your use of the Services is at your sole risk. We provide the Services on an “as is” and “as available” basis. We do not offer a service-level agreement and we do not guarantee uninterrupted availability, though we take the uptime of the application seriously.
2. We do not guarantee backups. Our hosting provider takes reasonable measures to protect data, but we make no promise that any particular backup exists or is restorable. You are responsible for keeping your own copies of anything you cannot afford to lose — for example by downloading invoice PDFs and keeping your own client records. This allocation of responsibility is part of the deal that lets us offer the Services at the prices we do.
3. We use encryption for data transmitted between your browser and our servers, and our database provider encrypts data at rest. Every customer's data is isolated with row-level security.
4. When you use the Services, you entrust us with your data, and your clients' data. We take that trust to heart. You agree that we may process your data as described in our Privacy Policy and for no other purpose. Where you store personal information about your own clients in Pinion, you are the “responsible party” and we are your “operator” under the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (“POPIA”); our Operator Agreement forms part of these Terms and is the written contract section 21 of POPIA requires.
5. As humans, we can access your data only: to help you with a support request you make (with your consent); to fix an error that stops an automated process partway through; to safeguard the Services (logs and metadata, or investigating an abuse report); or to the extent required by applicable law.
6. We use third-party vendors to provide the hardware, software, networking, storage, and payment processing required to run the Services. Our current sub-processor list shows who they are and where they process data.

Copyright and content ownership

1. You give us a limited licence to use the content you and your users post, solely to provide the Services to you. We claim no ownership rights over your materials — everything you submit to the Services remains yours.
2. We do not pre-screen content, but we reserve the right (though not the obligation), in our sole discretion, to refuse or remove content that violates these Terms or applicable law.
3. The Company or its licensors own all right, title, and interest in and to the Services, including all intellectual property rights. You may not duplicate, copy, or reuse any portion of the code or visual design elements, and you may not reproduce, resell or exploit any portion of the Services, without our express written permission.

Features and bugs

We design the Services with care, based on our own experience and the experience of customers who share their time and feedback. However, there is no such thing as a service that pleases everybody: we make no guarantees that the Services will meet your specific requirements or expectations. Like any software, the Services inevitably have some bugs. We track reported bugs and work through the priority ones — especially anything related to security or privacy — but not every reported bug will be fixed, and we don't guarantee completely error-free Services.

Use restrictions

When you use the Services, you acknowledge that you may not:

• Collect or extract information and/or user data from accounts that do not belong to you.
• Circumvent, disable, or otherwise interfere with security-related features of the Services.
• Trick, defraud, or mislead us or other users, including making false reports or impersonating another user.
• Upload or transmit (or attempt to) viruses or any type of malware or information-collection mechanism.
• Interfere with, disrupt, or create an undue burden on the Services or the networks they run on.
• Harass, annoy, intimidate, or threaten others, or anyone providing any portion of the Services to you.
• Use the Services to send spam or unsolicited commercial communications in breach of section 45 of ECTA or section 69 of POPIA.
• Use the Services in a manner inconsistent with any applicable laws or regulations.

Accounts found to be in violation of any of the above are subject to suspension or cancellation without prior notice. To report abuse, email [email protected] with details of the account and behaviour, including URLs or screenshots. We will not disclose your identity to anyone associated with the reported account.

Liability

We mention liability throughout these Terms, but to put it all in one place — please read this section carefully, because it limits what you can claim from us:

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law: the Company shall not be liable to you or to any third party for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, punitive or exemplary damages, including damages for loss of profits, goodwill, use, or loss of or damage to data or other intangible losses, resulting from the use of or inability to use the Services, unauthorised access to or alteration of your transmissions or data, or any other matter relating to these Terms or the Services — whether framed in contract, delict (including negligence), or any other theory of liability, and even if we have been advised of the possibility of such damages. In all cases, the Company's total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to these Terms or the Services is limited to the fees you actually paid us in the 12 months before the event giving rise to the claim.

Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits our liability for gross negligence, for fraud, or for any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited — including under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 where it applies to you. If you are a consumer under that Act, these Terms do not take away rights the Act gives you.

In plain language: choosing to use the Services means you are making a bet on us. We do our best to be a safe bet — through careful engineering, security measures, and giving a damn — but if the bet doesn't work out, what you can recover from us is capped at what you paid us in the last year. That trade-off is what makes a product at this price possible.

Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa. The parties consent to the jurisdiction of the Gauteng Local Division of the High Court of South Africa, Johannesburg — without limiting your right to bring a matter in a Magistrates' Court with jurisdiction. We do not subscribe to an alternative dispute resolution code. For matters concerning personal information you may also complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa) — contact details are in our Privacy Policy.

Questions

If you have a question about any of these Terms, contact us at [email protected].