Terms of Use

1Who we are

KuduDoc is an electronic signature and document-proof platform operated from South Africa. These Terms of Use govern your use of the KuduDoc website, the free PDF tools, the signing service, the Controlled Originals registry, and the public verification portal.

"KuduDoc", "we" and "us" mean the operator of the service. "You" means the person or organisation using it. If you accept these terms on behalf of a company, you're confirming you're authorised to do that.

Some features are still being built. Parts of this site describe features marked "in build" or "on our roadmap". Those markings are part of this agreement, not marketing decoration: a feature marked as not yet live is not something you are buying, and you shouldn't plan around it until it ships.

2Your account

You need an account to send documents for signature. You do not need one to verify a document, and you do not need one for most of the free PDF tools — that's on purpose.

• Keep your credentials to yourself. Anything done through your account is treated as done by you, until you tell us otherwise.
• One person per login. Sharing a password is how an audit trail stops meaning anything. Where a plan includes more than one seat, invite the person instead.
• Tell us promptly if you think someone else has access, and we'll help you lock it down.
• You must be legally capable of entering into contracts where you live. If you're under 18, don't create an account.
• Keep your email address current. It's how document notifications, billing notices and changes to these terms reach you.

3Acceptable use

Most of this is obvious. We're writing it down anyway, because a proof platform used to launder a forgery would be worse than no proof platform at all. Don't use KuduDoc to:

• Forge, impersonate or misrepresent — signing as somebody else, or presenting a document as sealed by KuduDoc when it isn't.
• Attack the service — malware, scraping at scale, or probing for vulnerabilities outside a responsible disclosure conversation. We genuinely welcome that conversation; see Contact.
• Send unsolicited bulk mail, or use signature requests as a delivery mechanism for spam or phishing.
• Process content you have no right to process, including personal information you have no lawful basis to hold.
• Resell, mirror or white-label the service without a written agreement with us.
• Interfere with the audit trail or the verification portal, or represent a verification result as saying something it doesn't say.

Where we reasonably believe an account is doing any of the above, we may suspend it. We'll tell you why, and give you a route to respond, unless the law stops us.

4Your documents and your rights to them

Uploading a file to KuduDoc gives us no ownership of it. What it gives us is a narrow, functional licence — to store, process, render, transmit and seal that document strictly in order to run the service you asked for.

• We don't sell your documents, share them for advertising, or use their contents to train AI models.
• AI reading tools are opt-in per account. Where clause extraction, summarisation or question-answering sends document text to a third-party model provider, that's disclosed in the privacy notice and can be switched off.
• You can export or delete. Deleting removes the document from your account and our active systems.
• Deletion has honest limits. It cannot recall copies already delivered to signers, and it does not erase a public timestamp — the timestamp is a fingerprint of the file, never the file, and its permanence is the entire point of it.
• If your account closes, we'll give you a reasonable window to export before removal.

5What the KuduDoc seal does and does not mean

When every party finishes signing, we apply a certification signature to the PDF (DocMDP), record a SHA-256 fingerprint of the completed file, and anchor that fingerprint using OpenTimestamps. Together we call that the seal. This section is the exact scope of what it claims — read it before you rely on it.

6Electronic signatures and the ECT Act

South Africa's Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 recognises data messages and electronic signatures. A KuduDoc signature is an ordinary electronic signature, captured with consent and intent, backed by an audit trail and a cryptographic seal.

It is not an Advanced Electronic Signature. Under the ECT Act, an AES is a defined category that must come from an accredited provider — and we are not one. We don't offer AES today. If that ever changes, it will be stated plainly on this page and on the security page, not implied.

We describe the legal framework, and we describe exactly what our signatures technically are. We never tell you that your particular document is valid or enforceable. That depends on the document, the parties and the facts, and it's a question for an admitted attorney.

7Plans, billing and VAT

• New accounts get 14 days on Family. After that you land on Personal, which is a free plan: five documents sent for signature a month, and up to three signers on each of them, ongoing, no card, no expiry date.
• Prices are in South African rand and include VAT. The amount you pay is shown in full before you pay it.
• Paid plans are billed in advance, for the period you take. As at the date on this page there is no live card payment — nothing here can charge you, and signing up gets you the Personal plan. What each paid plan costs, and what a seat covers on it, is set out on the pricing page rather than restated here.
• Upgrades apply immediately. There is no step down from one paid plan to another: cancelling is how a paid plan ends, and it takes effect straight away — the account returns to Free, and the Free limits apply from that moment. Cancel at the point you want the change rather than ahead of it, and tell us if that leaves you short of time you have already paid for.
• Metered add-ons are billed per check, at the rate published on the pricing page at the time the check runs. Identity verification, Home Affairs (HANIS) checks and background screening are on the roadmap and not switched on — nothing is metered against you until one of them actually runs.
• Billing, stated plainly: where the pricing page marks a price as illustrative, it is illustrative until that plan is switched on.
• Price changes get notice before they apply to you, and are never applied backwards to a period you've already paid for.

8Availability and support

• We don't publish an uptime SLA, and we're not going to invent a number for a page. If we ever commit to an availability target, it will be written into a separate signed agreement, not implied here.
• Support is by email. Free gets email support; Personal and up get priority email support. There's no call centre — we say so on the contact page rather than publish a number nobody answers.
• We may take the service down for maintenance. Where the work is planned, we'll aim for sensible hours and give notice.
• Things still move. Features can change, and anything marked "in build" may ship late, differently, or not at all.

9Liability

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including for fraud, or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Subject to that:

• The service is provided as-is. We don't warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or fit for a particular legal purpose you have in mind for it.
• We're not liable for indirect or consequential loss — lost profits, lost business, lost opportunity, or wasted expenditure.
• We're not liable for loss arising from the contents of a document, from a counterparty's conduct, or from relying on the seal to do something section 5 expressly says it doesn't do.
• Where liability can be limited, our total aggregate liability is capped at what you paid us for the service in the 12 months before the claim. On the Personal plan that figure is zero — which is a real consequence of it costing nothing, and worth knowing before you rely on it for something with serious stakes.
• You are responsible for your documents — their contents, and having the rights and the lawful basis to process what's in them.

10Termination

• You can close your account at any time. Export first — see section 4.
• We can suspend or close an account for a material breach of section 3, for non-payment, or where the law requires it of us.
• We'll give notice, a reason, and a window to export where we're able to.

11Changes to these terms

• We'll update this page and change the date at the top of it.
• Material changes get notice — by email or in-product — before they take effect. Not a silent edit.
• Continuing to use the service after a change takes effect means you accept the updated terms. If you don't accept them, export your documents and close the account.
• The date stays visible so you can tell whether the page you're reading is the page you agreed to.

12Governing law

• These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa.
• The South African courts have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.
• If any provision is found unenforceable, the rest of the terms survive unaffected.
• Nothing here limits rights you may have under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 or the ECT Act where those apply to you.