Terms of Use

1. Who these terms are between

1.1 AtChoir is provided by SJL Consulting (Pty) Ltd, registration number 2019/210092/07, a company incorporated in South Africa, with its registered address at 14 Leonor, Dundas Street, Strand, 7140. In these terms, "we", "us" and "SJL" mean SJL Consulting (Pty) Ltd. SJL trades the product as AtChoir.

1.2 The agreement is between SJL and an organisation: a choir, orchestra, band or ensemble that has been invoiced by us and has settled that invoice. In these terms, "the choir" means that organisation.

1.3 A member of a choir is not a party to this agreement. Members use AtChoir under the access their choir gives them. The choir is responsible for how its members use the service.

1.4 The person who accepts these terms on behalf of a choir confirms that they are authorised to bind the choir. In these terms we call that person, and any person the choir later appoints to administer its account, "the director".

2. How access is granted

2.1 There is no self-signup. A choir contacts us, we quote, we invoice, and the invoice is settled by EFT. Only then do we create the choir's organisation in AtChoir.

2.2 Once the organisation exists, the director provisions members. Members receive an invitation and sign in. They do not pay anything and are not asked to.

2.3 The mobile app is free to download from the Apple App Store and Google Play. The app contains no pricing and sells nothing. All commercial arrangements are made directly with SJL, outside the app stores.

2.4 An individual cannot buy access to AtChoir, subscribe, or start a trial. Access exists only inside a choir that has an active term with us.

2.5 The director controls the member list. Adding, removing and reassigning members is the choir's responsibility, not ours. When a member leaves the choir, the director should remove them.

3. What we provide

3.1 For the term the choir has paid for, we grant the choir a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use AtChoir for its own operations: attendance, calendar, chat, to-dos and projects.

3.2 We aim to keep the service available and to fix faults within a reasonable time. We do not promise uninterrupted availability. Maintenance, upgrades and third-party outages happen.

3.3 We may change, add or withdraw features. If a change materially reduces what the choir has paid for, we will say so in advance.

4. Acceptable use

4.1 AtChoir is for running a music organisation. It is not a general-purpose messaging or file-hosting service.

4.2 The choir must ensure that its members do not:

• use the service to harass, bully, threaten or abuse anyone
• post unlawful, defamatory or hateful content, or content that is sexual in nature
• post material they have no right to share
• attempt to access another choir's data, another member's account, or any part of the system they have not been given access to
• probe, scan or test the security of the service, or interfere with its operation
• use the service to send unsolicited commercial messages
• resell, sublicense or rent access to the service
• copy, decompile or reverse engineer the software

5. Accounts and security

5.1 Sign-in credentials are personal. Members must not share them.

5.2 The director must keep the member list accurate and must tell us promptly if they believe an account has been compromised.

5.3 Session tokens are held in the device keychain or keystore. Only hashes of those tokens are stored on our servers.

5.4 We may suspend an account, or a whole organisation, where we reasonably believe there is a security risk or a serious breach of clause 4. Where we can, we will tell the director first.

6. Content posted by members

6.1 Members post chat messages, tasks, project notes and similar content. That content belongs to the people who post it, or to the choir. It does not belong to us.

6.2 We do not monitor, moderate or review member content. Chat is between members of a choir. We do not read it as a matter of course, and nothing in the product screens it.

6.3 The choir is responsible for its members' conduct in AtChoir, and for setting and enforcing its own standards of behaviour. A complaint about something a member said or posted is, in the first instance, a matter for the choir's director.

6.4 If content in AtChoir is abusive, unlawful, or puts someone at risk, and raising it with the choir is not appropriate or has not resolved it, report it to us at info@sjl-consulting.co.za. Tell us the choir, roughly when it happened and what was said. We will look at it.

6.5 Where a report is substantiated, we may remove content, suspend an account or suspend an organisation. We will act proportionately, and we will tell the director what we have done unless doing so would put someone at risk.

6.6 We access member content only where it is necessary to run the service, to fix a fault, to act on a report under 6.4, or where the law requires it.

7. Personal information

7.1 Under the Protection of Personal Information Act, each choir is the responsible party for its members' personal information. SJL is the choir's operator, and processes that information on the choir's instructions.

7.2 SJL is the responsible party only for billing information and for its own service telemetry.

7.3 AtChoir does not record a date of birth, an age, or any flag marking someone as a minor. The service is built to the standard a child deserves, for everyone, so that it never needs to ask.

7.4 Where a choir has members under 18, consent is handled as a single attestation by the director on behalf of the choir. It is not collected as dozens of individual in-app consents.

7.5 Production data is stored under EU jurisdiction. No African region exists for this datastore, so EU is a deliberate choice, made to satisfy section 72 of the Act on cross-border transfers.

7.6 Telemetry records the method and the normalised route of a request. It never records names, email addresses, message content or any free text.

7.7 The Privacy Policy sets out in full what is held and why. It forms part of these terms.

8. Intellectual property

8.1 AtChoir, including the software, the mobile apps, the web console, the name, the logo and the design of the product, belongs to SJL Consulting (Pty) Ltd. Nothing in these terms transfers any of it.

8.2 The choir keeps everything it and its members put into the service: attendance records, calendar entries, messages, tasks and project data.

8.3 The choir grants us the limited right to host, store, transmit and display that content for the purpose of providing the service, and for no other purpose.

8.4 We may name a choir as a customer only with the director's written agreement.

8.5 Feedback and suggestions are welcome, and we may act on them without owing anything for doing so.

9. Fees and term

9.1 Fees are quoted per choir and invoiced directly by SJL. Payment is by EFT. Amounts are in South African rand and include VAT where it applies.

9.2 A term runs for the period stated on the invoice.

9.3 We will invoice for the following term before the current one ends. Renewal is a decision the choir makes each time. Nothing renews automatically by card.

9.4 Fees paid are not refundable in part when a choir stops using the service mid-term.

10. When a term lapses

10.1 Data is not destroyed the moment an invoice goes unpaid. A lapsed term moves through three stages.

10.2 Grace period. For 14 days after the term ends, the service continues to work exactly as before. We will remind the director.

10.3 Read-only. After the grace period, the organisation becomes read-only for a further 31 days. Members can still sign in, see attendance, the calendar, tasks and projects, and send and read chat messages — a choir stays able to coordinate through a lapse, including about settling the account. New events, tasks, projects and members cannot be created, and QR check-in stops.

10.4 Dormancy. After the read-only period, the organisation is made dormant. Members can no longer sign in, and the data is retained but not served.

10.5 A dormant organisation is kept for 12 months. Settling an invoice at any point in that window restores the organisation with its data intact.

10.6 At the end of the 12 months we delete the organisation's data. We will send the director a written warning before we do. A director may ask us to export the choir's data at any stage before deletion, and may ask us to delete it sooner.

10.7 Either party may end the agreement at the end of a term by telling the other in writing. We may end it immediately for a serious or repeated breach of clause 4, in which case the stages in this clause still apply to the choir's data.

11. Limitation of liability

11.1 AtChoir is a tool for running a choir. It is not a safety system, a legal record, or a substitute for the choir's own record-keeping. Attendance records should be checked before they are relied on for anything consequential.

11.2 The service is provided as it is. Beyond what these terms say, and beyond what the law requires of us, we give no warranties.

11.3 We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for loss of profit, for loss of goodwill, or for loss arising from what a member posts or does.

11.4 Our total liability to a choir for any claim, or series of related claims, is limited to the fees that choir paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose.

11.5 Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot be excluded by law, including liability for fraud, for wilful misconduct, or under the Consumer Protection Act where it applies.

11.6 The choir indemnifies us against claims brought by its own members, or by third parties, arising from the choir's use of the service or from content its members post, except where the claim arises from our own breach of these terms.

12. Governing law and disputes

12.1 These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa.

12.2 The parties will try to resolve a dispute by discussion first. Write to info@sjl-consulting.co.za setting out the problem.

12.3 If that does not resolve it, the parties submit to the jurisdiction of the courts of the Republic of South Africa.

13. Changes to these terms

13.1 We may change these terms. The current version always sits at atchoir.com, with the date it took effect at the top.

13.2 We will email the director at least 30 days before a material change takes effect. A material change is one that alters what the choir pays, what we may do with its data, or what the choir is liable for. Smaller corrections take effect when published.

13.3 If a choir does not accept a material change, it may end the agreement before the change takes effect, and we will refund the unused part of the term.

13.4 Continuing to use the service after a change takes effect means the choir accepts it.

14. General

14.1 If a clause is found to be unenforceable, the rest of these terms still stand.

14.2 The choir may not transfer this agreement without our written agreement. We may transfer it as part of a sale or reorganisation of our business, on written notice.

14.3 Not enforcing a term on one occasion does not waive it.

14.4 These terms, together with the invoice and the Privacy Policy, are the whole agreement between us.

15. Contact

SJL Consulting (Pty) Ltd, registration 2019/210092/07

14 Leonor, Dundas Street, Strand, 7140, South Africa

info@sjl-consulting.co.za

To set up a choir, or to ask about anything above, email info@sjl-consulting.co.za.