Payment & Subscription Terms

1. Acceptance of these terms

By submitting payment for any Prospectus product — a once-off Growth Report or a recurring Monitor, Growth, Intelligence, or Managed subscription — you agree to these Payment & Subscription Terms in addition to the general PayFast terms that apply to any payment processed through their platform. If you don't agree, don't complete checkout.

These terms cover billing, cancellation, and refunds specifically. They don't replace or repeat what each pricing tier includes — see pricing.html for that.

2. Once-off purchases — Growth Report

The Growth Report (R7,500) is a single, hand-run deliverable, not a subscription. You're charged once, at checkout. There's no recurring charge, no auto-renewal, and nothing further happens to your card after that one transaction.

The report itself is delivered within 3 business days of a confirmed payment, to the link generated at checkout.

3. Recurring subscriptions — Monitor, Growth, Intelligence, Managed

These four tiers are recurring monthly subscriptions, billed automatically through PayFast's own recurring-billing scheduler — not a script run by Prospectus. That means:

• Your card is charged the tier's listed monthly price the moment you complete checkout, and again on the same date every month after that, automatically, until the subscription is cancelled.
• Prospectus never sees or stores your card details — PayFast's own hosted checkout page handles that end entirely (see §9).
• There's no fixed minimum term. Subscriptions run indefinitely until you cancel.

4. Pricing & currency

All prices are in South African Rand (ZAR) and settle through PayFast, which processes in ZAR only. If Prospectus changes a tier's price, existing subscribers keep their current price for at least 30 days from the date of notice — sent to the email address used at checkout — before any change takes effect on their subscription.

5. Cancellation

Honest limitation: Prospectus doesn't have self-service subscription management yet — there's no dashboard where you can click "cancel" and have it happen instantly. Use the form below instead.

1. Submit a cancellation request (domain + email used at checkout) using the form below.
2. Prospectus confirms the request and cancels the subscription directly in PayFast within 1 business day.
3. Cancellation takes effect at the end of your current paid billing period — you keep access until then, and PayFast will not charge you again after that period ends.

Submitting a request here is what actually stops future billing — nothing is automatically cancelled just by, for example, uninstalling anything or ceasing to log in, since there's no login system tied to billing.

6. Refunds

Growth Report (once-off): Since this is hand-run research work, no refund is available once work has started on your report. If you cancel before work has started (contact us the same day), a full refund applies.

Subscriptions: Monthly charges aren't refunded for partial periods — if you cancel partway through a billing month, you keep access for the rest of that month rather than receiving a pro-rated refund. This is the standard basis on which the subscription price is set.

None of this limits any statutory right you have under South African consumer protection law that can't lawfully be excluded by these terms.

7. Failed or declined payments

If a recurring charge fails (expired card, insufficient funds, bank decline), PayFast's scheduler retries automatically per its own retry policy. If payment still hasn't succeeded after PayFast's retry window, the subscription is treated as lapsed and access to the paid tier's features stops until it's resolved — you won't be charged again for a lapsed subscription without actively resubscribing.

8. Changes to these terms

Prospectus may update these terms as the product changes (for example, once self-service subscription management exists, §5 will be rewritten to reflect that). Material changes affecting active subscribers — pricing, cancellation process, refund policy — will be notified by email to the address used at checkout, with at least 30 days' notice before taking effect.

9. Payment data & security

Card details are entered directly on PayFast's own hosted checkout page and never touch Prospectus's servers at any point — this site only ever receives a payment confirmation (an ITN — Instant Transaction Notification), which is cryptographically verified (signature check, source-IP check, and a server-to-server confirmation call back to PayFast) before anything is marked as paid.

The business name, domain, and email you provide at checkout are stored to fulfil and support your order/subscription, in line with Prospectus's handling of personal information under POPIA.

10. Contact

Questions about a specific charge, or anything on this page: use the cancellation form above for cancellations, or the request form on the pricing page for anything else — both are checked and followed up by hand.