Terms of service

1. Who these terms are with

"We", "us" and "Stellenbyte" mean Stellenbyte Solutions (Pty) Ltd, registration number 2025/693990/07, of Kuils River, Cape Town. "You" means the business or person engaging us. Our full company details are on our Legal & company information page.

2. What we provide

We provide the services described on our website and in your chosen plan or written quotation. That may include remote and on-site help desk support, security and endpoint protection, monitored backups, email and Microsoft 365 administration, network and Wi-Fi support, hardware procurement and setup, onboarding and IT advisory work, a Cyber Health Check assessment, and a monthly managed security plan.

Anything not expressly included in your plan or quotation is out of scope and will be quoted separately before we do it. We will never carry out chargeable work beyond your plan without telling you the cost first.

3. Assessments: the free IT check and the Cyber Health Check

The free IT check. The 20-minute IT health check is genuinely free and carries no obligation. You will receive a written summary of what we found. It is a high-level review based on what we can see in the time available — it is not an exhaustive audit, a penetration test or a guarantee that your systems are secure. Acting on the recommendations is entirely your choice.

The Cyber Health Check. This is a separate, paid assessment at the price published in our security section. It consists of a read-only collection of configuration data from your Microsoft 365 environment and an on-site review of your backups, network, remote access and working practices, delivered as a written report. We change nothing in your environment during the assessment. It is a point-in-time review of what we are given access to and what we can observe in the time available; like the free check, it is not a penetration test and it is not a guarantee that your systems are secure or that every weakness has been found.

Before we connect to any system of yours we require your written authorisation to do so and, where the assessment will involve personal information, a signed operator mandate under section 21 of POPIA. Where we offer to credit the assessment fee against a subsequent security plan, that credit applies only if the plan is taken up within the period stated at the time and is applied against the earliest instalments of that plan; it is not refundable in cash.

The report is yours. You may share it with your insurer, your broker, your auditor or your own clients. Because it describes weaknesses in your systems, we keep our copy secured, we do not disclose its contents to anyone else, and we delete the underlying raw collection data once the report has been delivered and any agreed remediation is complete.

4. Prices, VAT and payment

Prices are in South African Rand and are the full amount payable. Stellenbyte Solutions is not a registered VAT vendor, so no VAT is charged or included. Should we become liable to register for VAT, we will give you at least 30 days' written notice before VAT is added.

• Monthly retainers are payable monthly in advance, by EFT or debit order, on or before the first business day of each month.
• Project, assessment and add-on work is invoiced on completion and payable within 7 days.
• Security plans are charged per user, per month, in advance, based on the number of users covered on the first business day of that month. Minimum user counts are published with the prices. If your headcount changes during a month we adjust it on the next invoice rather than pro-rating mid-month.
• A security plan is provided alongside an active support retainer and is not sold on its own.
• Third-party hardware, software licences and subscriptions bought on your behalf are quoted and invoiced separately, and are payable in advance unless agreed otherwise.
• We may suspend services on 7 days' written notice if an invoice remains unpaid for more than 30 days. We will always warn you before suspending anything.

We may review our prices once in any 12-month period, giving you at least 30 days' written notice. This matters most for the security plans: the tools behind them are bought in United States dollars, so a material move in the exchange rate is a reason we may use this clause. If you do not accept a price increase you may cancel with effect from the date it would take effect, without penalty.

5. Minimum duration and cancellation

Retainers run month to month. There is no fixed-term lock-in and no early-termination penalty. The minimum duration of the agreement is one calendar month.

• You may cancel at any time by giving us 30 days' written notice (email is fine). You pay for the notice period; nothing further is owed.
• We may cancel on 30 days' written notice, or immediately if you materially breach these terms, fail to pay after warning, or ask us to do something unlawful.
• On cancellation we will, at no charge, provide you with your data, documentation of your setup, and reasonable assistance in handing over to your next provider for up to 14 days.
• Security plans run on the same month-to-month basis. When one ends, the protection, monitoring and backup services provided under it stop at the end of the notice period, and any data held in a tool we licensed on your behalf is exported to you or deleted, at your election. Cancelling a security plan does not cancel your support retainer, or the other way round, unless you say so.

Fees already paid for a month that has begun are not refundable, except where we have failed to provide the service. If you are a consumer with a cooling-off right under section 44 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, nothing here limits it.

6. Response times

Our response commitments are the time within which we will respond and begin work — not a guarantee of resolution time, which depends on the fault:

Essential plan	Response within 1 business day
Professional plan	Priority same-business-day response
Business plan	As set out in your written agreement
Business hours	Monday to Friday, 08:00–18:00; Saturday 08:00–13:00 (SAST). Outside these hours, work is by arrangement.

Where a fault depends on a third party — your internet provider, a hardware vendor, Microsoft — we will manage it on your behalf but cannot control their timelines.

7. What we need from you

To do our job we need you to give us reasonable and timely access to your systems and premises, accurate information about your setup, prompt decisions where we ask for them, and a named contact person. We are not responsible for delays or failures caused by access being withheld or information being wrong or incomplete.

You confirm that you are entitled to give us access to the systems and data concerned, and that doing so does not breach anyone else's rights.

8. Backups — read this one

Where your plan includes monitored backups, we configure them, monitor them and test restores periodically. No backup system is infallible. We do not warrant that every file will always be recoverable, and our liability for data loss is limited as set out in clause 10. Where backups are not part of your plan, responsibility for them remains entirely yours.

9. Security

Where your plan includes it, we configure, maintain and monitor the security controls it describes, and we report on them monthly. Some of those controls are delivered with the help of specialist suppliers — including round-the-clock monitoring of security alerts — who work under our contract and to our instruction; we remain responsible to you for the service. We will apply reasonable, industry-standard measures to protect your systems. However, no security measure eliminates risk. We do not guarantee that your systems will never be compromised, and we are not liable for a compromise arising from your staff's actions, software or hardware we did not supply or configure, a vulnerability for which no patch existed, or your decision not to act on a recommendation we made in writing.

Nothing in a security plan is a guarantee against a breach, and no plan is a substitute for cyber insurance. Where a plan is described as insurance-grade or as producing an insurance-readiness attestation, that means it is built around the controls insurers commonly require and that we will document your position honestly. It is not a promise that any particular insurer will offer cover, offer it at a particular price, or pay any particular claim — that decision is always the insurer's.

10. Our liability

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 where it applies to you.

Subject to that:

• Our total liability arising out of or in connection with the services in any 12-month period is limited to the total fees you paid us in the 3 months preceding the event giving rise to the claim.
• We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of profit, loss of business, loss of goodwill, or loss of anticipated savings.
• We are not liable for loss caused by events beyond our reasonable control, including load shedding, network or power failure, third-party outages, natural disaster or acts of government.

11. Confidentiality

We treat everything we learn about your business as confidential, and will not disclose it except to deliver the services, where you agree, or where the law compels us. This continues after our engagement ends. We handle personal information in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Where we process personal information on your behalf, we do so as an operator under section 21 of POPIA, only on your instructions and with appropriate security safeguards.

12. Intellectual property

You own your data, your systems and your documentation. We own our own tools, scripts, templates and know-how, including anything we develop generally in the course of our work, and we grant you a licence to use anything we supply specifically for you, for as long as you need it.

13. Third-party products

Hardware, software and cloud services we source for you are supplied subject to the manufacturer's or vendor's own warranty and terms. We will help you enforce a warranty claim, but we do not ourselves warrant third-party products.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms and will publish the current version on this page. Where a change materially affects an existing client, we will give at least 30 days' written notice. Continuing to use the services after that constitutes acceptance; if you do not accept, you may cancel under clause 5 without penalty.

15. Complaints and disputes

Contact us first at info@stellenbyte.co.za or +27 71 839 7615. We acknowledge complaints within one business day. If we cannot resolve a dispute between us within 30 days, either party may refer it to mediation before taking it further. This does not prevent either party from approaching a court for urgent relief.

16. General

These terms, together with your plan or quotation and any signed service agreement, form the whole agreement between us. If a court finds any part unenforceable, the rest remains in force. A failure to enforce a term is not a waiver of it. These terms are governed by South African law, and the parties consent to the jurisdiction of the courts of the Western Cape.