Terms of Service

These terms are an agreement between you — the business or person who uses a GritCMS workspace — and the business that operates GritCMS from Kampala, Uganda. In this document, “we” and “us” mean the operator of GritCMS, and “you” means the customer whose workspace it is.

You accept these terms when you start using a workspace we have set up for you, or when anyone you have given a login uses it. If you are agreeing on behalf of a company, you are confirming you are allowed to bind that company. If you do not accept the terms, tell us and we will close the workspace instead.

GritCMS is a hosted business platform. One workspace gives you a public website, a contacts and sales database, email marketing, courses, digital and physical products, bookings, a community area and affiliate tools, all running on our servers so you do not have to run any of your own.

There is no public signup button. Workspaces are created by us, by hand, after you talk to us — so every account starts with a real conversation about what your business actually sells. That also means you cannot open a second workspace yourself; ask us and we will create it.

We add, change and occasionally retire features. If we retire something you depend on, we will tell you before it goes and give you a way to get your data out of it.

You are responsible for everything that happens under your workspace, including everything your team members do with the logins you give them.

• Keep your credentials safe. Use a strong, unique password. Do not email it around or paste it into shared documents.
• One person per login. Logins are personal. Do not share one account between several people — add each person as their own team member instead, so you can see who did what and remove access cleanly when someone leaves.
• Your team is your responsibility. Anything a team member does in your workspace counts, for the purposes of these terms, as something you did.
• Tell us quickly if something is wrong. If you think someone has got into your workspace who should not have, email support@gritcms.com or message us on WhatsApp straight away and we will help you lock it down.

The rules here are short because they are mostly common sense. You may not use a GritCMS workspace to:

• Publish, sell or store anything illegal under Ugandan law or the law where your customers are — including material that exploits children, incites violence, or infringes someone else's copyright or trademark.
• Send spam. You may only email people who asked to hear from you. Buying, scraping or renting a contact list and loading it into GritCMS is not allowed, and neither is bulk unsolicited email of any kind.
• Impersonate anyone — another business, a bank, a government body, or us — or run phishing, fake stores, or any scheme designed to deceive the people receiving it.
• Attempt to break the platform: probing for vulnerabilities, bypassing limits, overloading the service, or trying to reach another customer's workspace or data. Every workspace is separated from every other, and attempting to cross that line is the one thing we treat as immediate grounds for suspension.
• Resell raw access to the platform as if it were your own infrastructure, unless we have agreed that in writing.

If a workspace does any of these, we may suspend it. Where the problem is fixable and not urgent we will contact you first and give you a chance to fix it. Where it is urgent — active phishing, illegal material, an attack on the platform — we will suspend first and explain afterwards.

Plans are priced per workspace, per month, in US dollars. You can see current prices on the pricing section. Here is how the money actually works:

• Your first month is free. Nothing is charged while you decide whether the platform fits your business.
• Invoices are issued on the 28th of each month, covering the month ahead plus any overage from the month just gone.
• You have three days to pay. After that the invoice is marked overdue.
• Five days after it goes overdue, the workspace becomes read-only. That is eight days from the invoice date in total.
• Paying clears it immediately. Settle the invoice and full access comes back within seconds — there is nothing to reactivate and no reconnection fee.

Prices are exclusive of any taxes or levies that apply where you are; if a tax applies to you, it is yours to pay. We may change plan prices with at least 30 days' notice by email, and the new price applies from your next invoice after the notice period.

Every plan includes an allowance for the two things that actually cost us money: storage (the videos, images and files you upload) and marketing emails (the bulk emails you send to your contacts). Each plan also has a contact limit.

If you go past a storage or email allowance we do not cut you off mid-campaign. The extra usage is metered and added as a separate, itemised line on your next invoice — so a busy month costs a little more rather than stopping your business. Overage rates are published on the pricing section alongside the plans.

You can see your current usage against your allowance at any time inside your workspace. If your usage has permanently outgrown your plan, tell us and we will move you up — it is usually cheaper than the overage.

This is the part people most often assume wrongly, so it is worth being blunt about it.

Because of that, a few things follow. Your relationship with DGateway or Stripe is governed by their terms, not ours, and their fees are between you and them. Payouts, holds, chargebacks and settlement timing are theirs to decide. If a buyer of yours needs a refund, you issue it from your own payment account — see the refund policy for how that works.

You are responsible for what you sell: that it is legal, that it is described accurately, that you deliver it, and that you meet the consumer-protection and tax obligations that apply to your business.

You own your content. Your pages, courses, products, posts, images, videos, emails, contacts, orders and customer records are yours. Using GritCMS does not transfer any of it to us and never will.

To actually run the service we need a narrow permission — in legal terms a licence, meaning permission to do specific things with your content. You grant us permission to store, copy, back up, transmit and display your content strictly for the purpose of operating the platform for you: serving your website to your visitors, delivering your emails, streaming your course videos to your students. Nothing more. We do not use your content to advertise, we do not sell it, and we do not repurpose it.

You can export at any time. Contacts, orders and your content can be exported from inside your workspace whenever you want, in standard formats you can open elsewhere. The one exception is a workspace that has gone read-only over an unpaid invoice, where exports are paused along with everything else — settle the invoice and export is available again immediately. If you ever need a full copy and cannot get it yourself, ask us.

You confirm that you have the right to upload what you upload, including the right to hold and email the contacts you import. How we handle personal data on your behalf is set out in the privacy policy.

We work hard to keep GritCMS up and we monitor it, but we do not promise a specific uptime percentage and we are not offering a service level agreement. Anyone who promises you 100% is guessing.

We will make reasonable efforts to keep the platform available, to restore it quickly when something breaks, and to schedule planned maintenance for quiet hours in East Africa. For maintenance we expect to be disruptive, we will give advance notice by email or in your workspace. Emergency fixes — a security patch, for example — may have to happen without notice.

Things outside our control (an upstream provider, a network failure, a government action, a natural event) can take the service down. We will tell you what we know and get you back up as fast as we can.

You can stop at any time. Tell us by email or WhatsApp and we will cancel at the end of the period you have already paid for. There is no notice period and no exit fee. The refund and cancellation policy covers the money side.

We can suspend or end an account if an invoice goes unpaid, if the acceptable use rules are broken, if we are legally required to, or if continuing would put the platform or other customers at risk. Except in urgent cases we will contact you first.

After an account is closed we keep your data for 30 days so that you can ask for a copy or change your mind, then we delete it from our live systems. Encrypted backups roll off on their own cycle after that. Once deletion has happened it cannot be undone, so export what you need before you close. Records we are required to keep for tax or accounting — an invoice history, for instance — are kept for as long as the law requires.

GritCMS is provided “as is”. We do not warrant — that is, we do not legally promise — that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or fit for a particular purpose you have in mind but have not told us about. To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude the implied warranties that would otherwise apply.

If something goes wrong and you suffer a loss, our total liability to you for all claims in any twelve-month period is limited to the amount you actually paid us for the service in that period. We are not liable for indirect losses — lost profit, lost sales, lost goodwill, or the cost of data you did not keep a copy of — even if we were warned they were possible.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot legally be limited — for example liability for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence.

Because you are responsible for what you publish and sell, you agree to cover us if a third party brings a claim against us that arises out of your content, your products, or your use of the platform in breach of these terms.

We may update these terms as the product changes or as the law requires. When we make a material change — one that actually affects your rights or what you pay — we will email the address on your account and update the “last updated” date at the top of this page at least 14 days before it takes effect.

Small corrections — a typo, a clearer sentence — may be made without notice. If you keep using your workspace after a change takes effect, that counts as accepting it. If you do not accept it, cancel before the effective date.

These terms are governed by the laws of Uganda. Any dispute that comes out of them will be handled by the courts of Kampala, Uganda, and both sides agree to that.

Before anyone goes near a court, talk to us. Almost every disagreement we have seen was a misunderstanding about an invoice or an allowance, and a WhatsApp message fixed it the same day.

Email support@gritcms.com or message +256 762 063 160 on WhatsApp. We are based in Kampala, Uganda and work East Africa Time.