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Terms & Conditions

The terms that apply when you engage Avuno Technologies or use our website and client portal.

Last updated: 23 August 2026

These Terms & Conditions ("Terms") govern your use of the Avuno website (avuno.co.za), your Avuno account and website builder (account.avuno.co.za), and the services provided by Avuno Technologies (Pty) Ltd (registration number 2026/499872/07), a company based in Mossel Bay, Western Cape, South Africa ("Avuno", "we", "us"). By creating an account, engaging our services or using our sites, you agree to these Terms.

1. The two ways of working with us

Avuno works in two ways, and a few clauses below apply to one and not the other:

  • Studio projects. We design and build a website, a web or mobile application, or AI automation for you. This work is quoted individually.
  • Self-serve. You create your own account, build your own website in our builder, and publish it on your own domain on a monthly plan. Anyone can sign up — you no longer need an invitation from us.

We also offer monthly website care and hosting plans, which are recurring subscriptions.

2. Your account

Anyone can create an Avuno account. You give us your name, email address and a password, and we send a verification email — your account is fully usable once you have confirmed the address. You can sign in with Google instead of a password, and you can switch on two-factor authentication, which we recommend.

You agree to give us accurate details, to keep your password and your two-factor backup codes to yourself, and to tell us promptly if you think someone else has got into your account. You are responsible for what happens under your account. If you sign up on behalf of a business, you confirm you are allowed to accept these Terms for that business. Accounts are for people aged 18 or over.

3. Free to build, paid to go live

Building and previewing a website is free. You can create an account, enter your business details, generate draft copy, upload images, change the design and look at the result as often as you like, without paying us anything.

Going live on your own domain needs a paid plan. Publishing your site to your own domain, and us hosting and serving it to the public, requires an active paid subscription. If there is no active subscription, the site is not served to the public — see section 6.

4. Quotes and proposals

Before starting studio project work we provide a written, fixed-scope quote in South African Rand. A quote is valid for 30 days unless stated otherwise. Work begins once you accept the quote and pay the agreed deposit. Your quote sets out what is included, along with any included revision rounds; work requested beyond the agreed scope will be quoted and charged separately.

5. Fees and payment

  • Project work is typically invoiced as a deposit to secure and begin the work, with the balance due on completion or per the milestones set out in your quote.
  • Plans and care plans are billed monthly in advance through Paystack, our payment provider, and renew automatically until you cancel.
  • We never see or store your card details. You enter them on Paystack's own secure payment page. What reaches us is a payment reference, an amount and whether the payment succeeded.
  • All prices are in South African Rand. Late or failed payments may pause active project work and, for subscriptions, lead to suspension of hosting as set out below.

6. If a payment is missed: reminders, suspension, and getting back online

Subscriptions renew automatically. If a payment fails, nothing happens to your website straight away. There is a grace period, and this is exactly what happens during it, counted in days after the payment was due:

  • 2 days overdue — we email you a first reminder.
  • 5 days overdue — we email you a second reminder.
  • 8 days overdue — we email you a final reminder, which tells you the date the site will be suspended.
  • 11 days overdue — the site is suspended. Visitors to your domain see a temporary holding page instead of your website.

Suspension is not deletion. Suspending your site does not delete it. Your pages, your text, your images and your account all stay on our servers exactly as you left them. The holding page is temporary and sits in front of your site; it does not replace it.

When the outstanding payment goes through, we restore your site. It comes back the way it was — same pages, same content, same domain — and you do not have to rebuild anything or start again.

We keep a suspended site for 12 months. We will not delete it without contacting you in writing first and giving you a fair chance to pay, to restart, or to ask us for a copy of your content. The full retention schedule is in our Privacy Policy.

7. If you cancel

You can cancel a subscription at any time. Cancelling stops the next payment; it is not a refund of the period you are already in. Your website stays live until the end of the period you have paid for.

At the end of that paid period the same thing happens as with a missed payment: your site is replaced with a temporary holding page, and your content is kept, not deleted. If you change your mind and restart the subscription, we put your site back up as it was. If you would rather we deleted your content, tell us and we will — see our Privacy Policy. Cancellations are also governed by our Cancellation Policy and refunds by our Refund Policy, both of which form part of these Terms.

8. Your content, your domain, and who owns what

  • You own your content. The words, images, logo, prices and business details you put into your site stay yours. You give us permission to store, adapt, display and serve that content for the sole purpose of building and hosting your website. That permission ends when you leave.
  • You own the copy generated for your site. The draft wording generated for your website is yours to use, edit and keep, including after you stop being a customer.
  • You own your domain. It is registered in your name with your own registrar. Leaving Avuno does not affect it — you simply point it somewhere else.
  • We own the platform. The builder, our templates and design system, the underlying code and our hosting setup remain ours. Using them while you subscribe does not transfer them to you.
  • Studio projects. Where we build something custom for you, ownership of the final deliverables transfers to you once the project is paid for in full. Third-party components such as fonts, libraries and stock assets remain subject to their own licences. We may display non-confidential work in our portfolio unless you ask us in writing not to.

What happens to the generated site if you leave. Plainly: you keep your content, your text, your images and your domain, and you keep the right to use the copy that was written for you. You do not keep our platform, and your site stops being served from our hosting at the end of your paid period. You can ask us for a copy of the content you put in and the copy generated for you, and we will give it to you in a usable format. Rebuilding it elsewhere is your job — we cannot hand over the software that renders it.

9. AI-generated content

Our builder can generate first-draft copy for your website. To do that we send your business name, what the business does, your town and your phone number to Anthropic's Claude API, which returns suggested wording. Our Privacy Policy covers the data side of this.

Treat that wording as a starting point, not a finished text. You are responsible for reading it and checking it before you publish. Check anything factual in particular: prices, opening hours, service areas, qualifications, guarantees, claims about what your business does, and anything regulated in your industry.

We do not warrant that generated copy is accurate, complete, current or unique. AI systems can state things confidently and still be wrong. They can also produce wording similar to wording generated for someone else, so we cannot promise it is original or that it does not resemble text on another website. Once you publish, you are the publisher: if a claim on your live site is wrong or misleading, that sits with you, not with us.

Do not put other people's personal information, or material you do not hold the rights to, into the builder.

10. Acceptable use

When you use your account, our builder or our hosting, you agree not to:

  • publish or store anything illegal under South African law, or anything that infringes another person's copyright, trade mark or other rights;
  • impersonate anyone — no passing yourself off as another business or person, and no pretending to be a bank, a government department or Avuno;
  • upload, host or distribute malware, phishing pages, or anything built to damage a system or gain unauthorised access to one;
  • use your site or our systems to send spam or unsolicited bulk messages;
  • attempt to break, overload, probe or work around the security of our systems, or resell our hosting without our agreement.

If you breach this section we may remove the offending content or suspend your account. For something serious or unlawful we may do that immediately and without notice, and we may report it to the authorities. Where we can, we will tell you what we did and why.

11. Domains and your registrar

You buy your domain yourself, from a third-party registrar, in your own name. Avuno is not a domain registrar. We do not sell you the domain and we do not control its renewal. In practice that means:

  • the registration, the renewal dates and the renewal payments sit between you and your registrar;
  • if the domain lapses, is suspended or is transferred away, your website stops resolving, and that is outside our control;
  • your registrar's own terms and privacy policy apply to the registration.

We will help you point the domain at your site, and we run DNS lookups on the domain you enter so we can check it is configured correctly. Being able to look up your DNS gives us no control over your domain.

12. Hosting and availability

Paid plans include managed hosting, SSL, backups, updates, monitoring and support according to the plan tier you choose. We aim for high availability but provide uptime on a best-effort basis, and we are not responsible for downtime caused by third parties, by your registrar, by changes you make yourself, or by events beyond our reasonable control.

13. Third-party services

We rely on reputable third-party services to run the product: Paystack (payments), Anthropic (AI-generated copy), DataForSEO (search data behind our free AI visibility check), Google (sign-in and our business email), and our hosting and content-delivery providers. Your use of those services is also subject to their own terms. What each one receives is set out in our Privacy Policy.

14. Your visitors' personal information: our written operator agreement

Your website can collect personal information from your own visitors — an enquiry form, a booking request, a callback request. That information belongs to them, and under POPIA you are the responsible party for it: you chose to collect it and you decide what it is for. We are your operator, because we hold and process it for you when we host your site.

Sections 20 and 21 of POPIA require that arrangement to be in writing. This section is that written operator agreement. It applies to every customer whose website we host, from the day you start hosting with us, and there is no separate document to sign.

It covers your visitors' personal information only. The information in your own Avuno account — your name, your email address, your payment records — is a different thing: there we are the responsible party ourselves, and our Privacy Policy sets out how we handle it.

What we undertake.

  • We act only on your instructions. We process your visitors' personal information only on your documented instructions. Your instructions are the settings you choose in your account, the forms you build, and anything else you ask us for in writing. If a law compels us to do something else, we will tell you first unless that law forbids it.
  • We keep it confidential, and we do not use it for ourselves. We do not sell your enquiry list, market to it, or use it for our own purposes or to train anything. Anyone working for us who can reach it is bound to keep it confidential.
  • We secure it. We apply appropriate, reasonable technical and organisational measures to protect it against loss, damage and unauthorised access, as section 19 of POPIA requires. What those measures are in practice is described in our Privacy Policy.
  • We tell you quickly if something goes wrong. If we discover that your visitors' personal information has been accessed or acquired by someone who should not have it, we notify you without undue delay and give you what we know. You need that because the duty to notify the Information Regulator and the people affected under section 22 of POPIA is yours, not ours — you are the responsible party. We will give you the detail you need to do it.
  • We use sub-operators, and you accept them. To run the service we rely on our hosting and content-delivery providers, our email provider and our payment provider. Each one is named, with what it receives, in our Privacy Policy. By hosting with us you accept our use of them. We remain answerable to you for what they do with your visitors' information, and we will keep that list current if a supplier changes.
  • We help you answer your own visitors. If one of your visitors contacts us directly about their information, we will not answer on your behalf. We pass it to you and help you respond.
  • When we part ways, you choose. On termination we will, at your election, return your visitors' personal information to you in a usable format or delete it. Tell us which you want. If you tell us nothing, the retention periods in our Privacy Policy apply and it is deleted at the end of them.

What you undertake. You warrant that you have a lawful basis under POPIA for everything you collect through your website, that you have told your visitors what you collect and why, and that you have your own privacy notice where one is needed. You agree not to use our forms to collect information you have no lawful reason to hold, and not to collect a child's information or special personal information through them without meeting the extra requirements POPIA sets for that. If a claim is made against us because of what you chose to collect, that sits with you.

15. The free AI visibility check

The check at is free and provided as it stands. It reports what we could find at the moment we ran it. It is a snapshot, not a guarantee of how any search engine or AI assistant will describe your business now or in future, and nothing in it is a promise of rankings or results.

Submitting the form creates a sales lead record with us. We only follow up with you about what we do if you tick the opt-in box on the form. The box is not ticked for you, and running the check does not depend on it — you get your report either way. You can withdraw that consent at any time. Our Privacy Policy explains how, and how we record consent.

16. Limitation of liability, and what we cannot limit

We would rather this clause were honest than impressive. A cap that a South African court will not enforce is worth nothing to either of us, so we have set out both sides of it.

What we do limit. To the maximum extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss — lost profit, lost revenue, lost data, loss of goodwill or business interruption — and our total liability for any claim relating to a service is limited to the amount you actually paid us for that service in the twelve months before the claim arose.

What we cannot limit, and do not try to. South African law does not allow certain liability to be signed away. Nothing in these Terms excludes or limits our liability for:

  • gross negligence or wilful misconduct on our part — the Consumer Protection Act and our common law do not permit that to be contracted out of;
  • death or personal injury caused by our negligence;
  • fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
  • damage under section 99 of POPIA — a data subject may claim civil damages for harm caused by a breach of POPIA, whether or not we were negligent, and that liability cannot be capped or excluded by these Terms;
  • anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

If a court finds any part of this clause unenforceable, the rest of it still stands.

17. Your consumer rights

Nothing in these Terms limits your rights under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 or the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002, where these apply to you.

18. Changes to the service and to these Terms

We improve and change the product over time, and we may add, change or retire features. We will not make a change that removes something central to your plan without telling you. We may also update these Terms from time to time; the "last updated" date above reflects the current version, and continuing to use your account after a change means you accept the updated Terms.

19. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa, and the South African courts have jurisdiction.

20. Contact us

Questions about these Terms? Email hello@avuno.co.za or use our contact page. Avuno Technologies (Pty) Ltd, Mossel Bay, Western Cape, South Africa.