Refund and Cancellation Policy

1. What this policy covers

This policy covers one thing: the subscription a church pays US for the GraceHub platform. Money a member gives or pays through the app, whether a donation, a merchandise order or an event ticket, is the church's money, settled into the church's own account. We cannot refund it. Only that church can. Section 9 says how to reach them.

AI Soft (Pty) Ltd (“we”, “us”), registration number 2025/881016/07, of 332 Boundary Road, North Riding, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2169, South Africa, publishes GraceHub. A church subscribes to the platform and pays us a monthly fee for it. This policy sets out how that subscription is billed, how it is cancelled, when we refund and when we do not, and what happens to a church's data afterwards.

It forms part of our Terms of Service and should be read with section 6 of those Terms. Where this policy and the Terms differ on billing, this policy governs.

Covered here

Church subscriptions to the platform: billing, renewals, upgrades, downgrades, failed payments, cancellation, and refunds of subscription fees.

Not covered here

Donations, merchandise orders and event tickets. Those are transactions between a member and their church, and the church decides them. Section 9 explains the arrangement and what each side is responsible for.

Members pay us nothing. Installing the app, signing in and using it is free to the member: there is no in-app purchase, no member subscription and no paywall. If anyone asks a member to pay for access to GraceHub itself, it is not us asking.

2. Who the subscription is with

• The customer is the church or organisation that holds the account, not the individual who happened to enter the card.
• Only the account owner, or a user the church has given an administrator or finance role, can start, change or cancel a subscription. Anyone else is refused by the system, not merely discouraged.
• Whoever accepts a plan confirms they are authorised to commit the church to it. If someone without that authority subscribed your church, tell us: that is a refundable charge under section 6.
• The billing contact is the email address on the account. Renewal notices, failed-payment warnings, price-change notices and refund decisions all go there, so keep it current and monitored.

Most churches are juristic persons rather than natural persons, and parts of South African consumer legislation are written for natural persons or for smaller juristic persons. Nothing in this policy assumes those protections away. Where they apply, they apply in full. See section 8.

3. How subscriptions are billed

• Subscriptions are priced and charged in South African Rand (ZAR) and billed monthly in advance. Paying for a month buys that month.
• The first payment is taken when the plan is accepted. Each later payment is taken automatically on the card used, on the same day of each following month, until the subscription is cancelled.
• Payments run on Paystack's own hosted page, opened in your browser, so you see the real paystack.com address before entering a card. We never receive or store card numbers, expiry dates or CVVs.
• Plans are sized by the number of member records the church keeps. Passing a plan's member limit means moving up a plan; the current plan, its limit and the next renewal date are all shown under Settings → Billing.
• Enterprise subscriptions are quoted, agreed and invoiced separately. Where that written agreement says something different from this policy, the agreement wins.
• Every charge is listed under Settings → Billing → Billing history with its amount, date, status and payment reference. That reference is what makes any later query quick to answer.

A subscription renews automatically, on purpose: the platform a church runs its membership, giving and safeguarding records on should not stop working because someone forgot to click a button. Cancel it whenever you like under section 5, with no notice period and no penalty.

4. The free trial

• A new church starts on a free trial. No card is taken, so you cannot be charged during a trial, and a trial cannot silently roll into a paid subscription.
• The trial runs on a limited member allowance. It is meant to be evaluated properly, not run as a free production system for a congregation.
• A trial becomes a paid subscription only when someone with billing permission picks a plan and completes payment on Paystack's page.
• Nothing entered during the trial is lost when you subscribe. It is the same workspace, with the limit lifted.
• If you decide not to subscribe, do nothing. There is nothing to cancel, nothing to pay, and no invoice will appear.

5. Cancelling a subscription

You may cancel at any time, for any reason, without giving one. Monthly plans have no minimum term, no notice period and no cancellation fee.

There are two ways to do it:

• In the console: Settings → Billing → Cancel Subscription. Visible to the account owner and to administrators with billing permission.
• By email: write to info@aisoft.co.za from an address on the account, naming the church and asking for the subscription to be cancelled.

What cancelling does, and does not do:

• It stops the next payment. It is not backdated, and it does not cut short the month you have already paid for.
• The subscription stays fully active until the end of the period already paid for. That end date is shown in Settings → Billing.
• On that date paid features close and the account drops back to trial-level access. You can still sign in, read your records and export them.
• Nothing is deleted. Cancelling a subscription and deleting a church account are two different acts. See section 10 for the second one.
• You can resubscribe at any time. Resubscribe before the end date and nothing is interrupted at all.
• We confirm every cancellation in writing to the billing contact.

If you cancelled and no written confirmation arrived, treat the cancellation as not done and write to info@aisoft.co.za. An unconfirmed cancellation is the one way a church ends up paying for a month it did not want.

Cancel before your renewal date rather than on it. A payment already submitted to the bank on the day cannot be pulled back mid-flight; it becomes a refund request under section 6 instead, which we honour, but which takes days rather than seconds.

6. When we refund

The list below is what we refund as a matter of course. It is not exhaustive: where something has plainly gone wrong on our side, say so and we will put it right.

• Duplicate charge, meaning you were billed twice for the same period. Refunded in full, without argument.
• A charge after cancellation, meaning a payment taken for a period beginning after a cancellation we confirmed. Refunded in full.
• A billing error on our side, such as the wrong plan, the wrong amount, or the wrong church charged. We refund the difference, or the whole charge where that is the right answer.
• An unauthorised charge, where someone without billing authority subscribed the church, or a card was used without the holder's permission. We refund and help you secure the account.
• Paid but never provisioned, where the payment succeeded at Paystack and no subscription appeared on the account. We refund it, or activate the subscription, whichever you would rather have.
• A material failure of the service. Where the platform was substantially unavailable for a prolonged stretch of a paid month through our fault, we refund or credit a fair share of that month. Maintenance we announced in advance is not that.
• Anywhere the law requires a refund. See section 8.

Any payment that came out after a cancellation we confirmed is refunded in full. That is our error, not a judgement call, and we do not ask you to argue it.

7. When we do not refund

So that this policy is honest rather than a list of promises quietly not kept, here is the other half:

• The remainder of a month cancelled mid-cycle. Cancellation takes effect at the end of the paid period and you keep the service for all of it. Monthly billing is what makes that fair in both directions, because the most a church is ever exposed to is one month.
• Non-use. A month in which nobody signed in is still a month in which the platform was available, hosted, backed up, monitored and supported.
• Modules a church chose not to switch on, or features it chose not to use. A plan is priced as a whole, not per feature.
• Paystack's processing fee and our platform fee on a donation, merchandise or ticket transaction. Those were incurred when the payment was taken, and they belong to a transaction the church chose to run. See section 9.
• Money a member gave or paid to a church. It never reached us. See section 9.
• Charges older than six months, unless the law says otherwise or the error is ours and has only now come to light.
• Onboarding, migration, data-import, training or custom development work already performed. Where that work was agreed separately, its own agreement governs what happens to it.
• The unused part of a subscription on an account we terminated for a serious breach of the Terms of Service, such as abuse, fraud, or anything falling under our Child Safety Standards.

We also do not offer refunds as a way of settling a disagreement with a church's own leadership, or of reversing a decision one part of a church made and another disagreed with. Those are conversations to have inside the church.

8. Your rights under South African law

Nothing in this policy removes a right the law gives you. Where this policy and the law disagree, the law wins and we apply it.

Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002

Section 44 gives a consumer who is a natural person the right to cancel certain electronic transactions within seven days, without reason and without penalty, and to be refunded within 30 days. A subscription held by a church as an organisation usually falls outside that section, but where it applies we honour it in full and do not ask why.

Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008

Where the Act applies, broadly to natural persons and to smaller juristic persons, we do not attempt to exclude the rights it gives, including the right to cancel a fixed-term agreement on 20 business days' notice subject to a reasonable cancellation charge. Our monthly plans carry no fixed term, so there is no such charge to make.

Chargebacks and bank disputes

You always keep the right to dispute a charge with your bank or card issuer, and we will not close an account or penalise a church for exercising it. We would still rather you wrote to us first: we can usually settle a billing error in days, where a chargeback takes weeks and leaves your account in an unclear state while it runs.

Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013

Ending a subscription does not end our obligations to the people whose records are on the platform. What happens to that data is set out in section 10 and in our Privacy Policy.

9. Donations, merchandise and tickets: your church, not us

We cannot refund a donation, a merchandise order or an event ticket, and we will not pretend otherwise. The money is not ours to give back: it settles into the church's own Paystack account, not into ours.

When a member gives, buys merchandise or buys a ticket through the platform, the church is the recipient and the seller. Paystack pays the money into the church's own account, less Paystack's processing fee and our platform fee. What we hold is a record of the transaction. The funds are the church's, and so is the decision to refund them.

Donations

A gift to a church. It is voluntary, buys nothing, and unlocks no feature of the app. Once processed a gift is generally not refundable, but a church may reverse one at its discretion for a mistaken amount, a duplicate gift or a wrong fund, and many will. Ask them.

Merchandise

The church is the seller. It sets the price, holds the stock, fulfils the order, and handles returns, refunds and exchanges under its own returns policy and under South African consumer law, including the Consumer Protection Act's cooling-off right on goods bought at a distance and the right to return goods that are defective, unsafe or not as described.

Event tickets

The church is the organiser. It decides whether a ticket can be refunded, transferred or resold, and what happens if an event is cancelled, postponed or moved. Those terms are shown at checkout and printed on the ticket.

If you are a member and you want a refund on one of these:

• Go to your church first: its office, its finance team, or the contact details on the receipt emailed to you.
• Have the payment reference ready, from that receipt or from your order and giving history in the app. It is what lets the church find the transaction in seconds rather than an afternoon.
• If nobody at the church responds, email info@aisoft.co.za. We will not refund you, because we cannot, but we will identify the transaction and put you in front of the person at the church who can.

If you are a church taking these payments, you are the merchant:

• Publish your own refund, returns and ticket terms, and honour them. Your members are your customers, and under South African consumer law the obligation to the buyer is yours, not ours.
• Issue refunds from your Paystack dashboard, against the original transaction, rather than by cash or a separate EFT, so the payment record, the receipt and your books continue to agree.
• A refund does not automatically return the Paystack processing fee or the platform fee charged on that transaction. Those were incurred when the payment was taken.
• Mark the transaction as refunded in GraceHub. Refunded and failed payments are excluded from giving totals, averages and counts, so your reporting stays true only if the record is updated.
• Where you have issued a tax receipt for a gift you later refund, correct the receipt. That obligation is the church's under South African tax law.

10. What happens to your data when a subscription ends

• Cancelling deletes nothing. Your records stay exactly where they are; the account returns to trial-level access, so you can still sign in, read everything and export it.
• Export before you go. Members, giving, events and reports all have export views, and if you want a complete copy of the church's data, ask info@aisoft.co.za and we will produce one.
• Deleting the church account is a separate and deliberate act. Only the account owner can do it, under Settings → Account. We email a confirmation code, the account is deactivated the moment the code is entered, and the data is permanently erased 30 days later.
• You can cancel a scheduled deletion at any point within those 30 days and the account comes back intact. After the 30 days it is gone, and we cannot restore it.
• Deleted data disappears from encrypted backups as those roll off, within 90 days.
• A small amount survives on a legal basis: anonymised financial records for five years, and safety records. The Privacy Policy sets out exactly what and why.
• Cancelling a subscription does not delete an account, and deleting an account does not by itself refund anything. If you mean both, do both.

11. Failed payments, and what happens before anything closes

• A renewal can fail for ordinary reasons: an expired card, insufficient funds, or a bank decline on an unfamiliar merchant. We do not switch the platform off that day.
• Paystack retries the charge and notifies the card holder. Updating the card under Settings → Billing is usually all that is needed for the retry to go through.
• We will not close paid features over a failed payment without contacting the billing contact first and giving a reasonable chance to fix it. When they do close, it is exactly as it would be on cancellation: nothing is deleted, and you keep read and export access.
• Settle the outstanding amount and full access returns immediately, with your data as you left it.
• We charge no late fee, no reactivation fee and no interest on a failed subscription payment.

12. Price changes, upgrades and downgrades

• We give at least 30 days' notice before a price increase takes effect, by email to the billing contact and in the console.
• A price change never applies to a period you have already paid for.
• If you do not accept a new price, cancel before it takes effect and you pay nothing further. We would rather you did that than felt trapped by a renewal.
• Upgrading takes effect immediately, so the larger member limit and the additional features are available at once.
• Downgrading takes effect at the end of the current paid month, so you keep everything you have already paid for. We do not refund the difference for the remainder of that month.
• We may add, change or withdraw features. For a material reduction affecting subscribing churches we give 30 days' notice, except where a security or legal issue requires acting sooner.

13. How to ask for a refund, and how long it takes

One email, read by a person. There is no form to fill in and no ticket queue to survive.

Send it to

info@aisoft.co.za

Subject line

Refund request for [your church's name]

Include

The church name, the payment reference or the date and amount from Settings → Billing → Billing history, and what went wrong. The reference is the fastest of these by a distance.

• We acknowledge within one business day.
• We decide within five business days, and we give you the reason either way, including when the answer is no.
• An approved refund is submitted to Paystack within five business days of that decision.
• The money returns to the card or account it came from. We cannot pay a refund to a different account, which is a fraud control rather than an inconvenience.
• Your bank then takes its own time, typically five to ten business days for a card refund to appear on a statement. That part is not ours to speed up.
• Refunds are made in ZAR, for the amount charged. Where a card was billed in another currency, your bank's rate on the day of the refund applies and we cannot make up a difference caused by a rate movement.

If you disagree with a decision, reply and say so. Refund decisions are made by people, and a more senior person will look again on request. Write to info@aisoft.co.za with “Escalation” in the subject and we respond within five business days. Where the Consumer Protection Act applies you may also take the matter to the National Consumer Commission, and your right to go to your bank or to court is unaffected either way.

14. Changes to this policy, and contact

We may update this policy. Material changes are emailed to the billing contact at least 30 days before they take effect. The version that governs a charge is the one published on the day that charge was taken, and a later edit cannot be applied backwards to a payment you have already made.

Company

AI Soft (Pty) Ltd (2025/881016/07)

Address

332 Boundary Road, North Riding, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2169, South Africa

Billing, cancellations and refunds

info@aisoft.co.za

This policy

https://grace-hub.co.za/refunds