Terms and Conditions
The plain-English terms for using the Small Business Growth Engine.
1. Who we are
These terms govern the use of the Small Business Growth Engine website and service (“the Service”).
The Service is operated by Growth Engine (Pty) Ltd (registration number 2026/674181/07), trading as Growth Engine, of 16 Carissa Street, Durbanville, 7550, South Africa. Contact details are available on the Contact page.
2. What the Service is
The Small Business Growth Engine helps small businesses grow using their existing customers. On your instruction, it sends WhatsApp messages to your customers to request feedback, invite Google reviews from happy customers, invite referrals, welcome customers back, and share offers, and it gives you a simple portal to manage customers, feedback and rewards.
The Service is a tool operated under your direction: you choose which customers to contact and which growth actions to run.
3. Subscriptions and the free trial
The Service is offered as a monthly subscription at (ZAR), including . There is no fixed-term contract and you can cancel at any time.
- Every subscription starts with a 14-day free trial. Your card is saved securely with our payment provider when you sign up, and nothing is charged on day one.
- The first charge happens on day 14 of the trial. We send you a reminder email two days before the first charge.
- If you cancel at any time during the trial, nothing is charged and you pay nothing.
Before your card is saved you are shown the subscription amount, billing frequency, cancellation terms and payment-provider details, and no subscription starts without your explicit authorization of the recurring payment.
4. Billing and payments
Subscription payments are processed by PayFast, a regulated South African payment provider. We do not collect or store your card number or banking details; those are held by PayFast under its own terms and privacy policy.
You can buy additional message credits inside the Service when your monthly allowance runs out; prices are always shown before you buy.
Cancellation and refund handling for subscriptions is described in the Refund and Cancellation Policy.
No VAT is charged on the subscription price: Growth Engine (Pty) Ltd is not VAT registered. Should that change, updated pricing and VAT treatment will be published here and on the pricing page before it takes effect.
5. Your account and responsibilities
- You must be at least 18 years old and authorised to act for the business you register.
- You must provide accurate registration and account information and keep it up to date.
- You are responsible for activity that happens through your account and for keeping access to it secure.
6. Your customers’ information
When you add customers to the Service, you confirm that:
- you have a lawful basis to contact them (for example, they are your existing customers or have consented);
- the information you provide about them is accurate; and
- you will honour opt-outs — when a customer asks not to receive offers, the Service records this and excludes them from promotional messages, and you agree not to circumvent that.
Our handling of personal information is described in the Privacy Policy.
7. WhatsApp and other third parties
The Service depends on third-party platforms, most importantly WhatsApp, which is operated by Meta. We do not control WhatsApp and cannot guarantee its availability, delivery times, message rules or pricing. Features of the Service may need to change if WhatsApp’s rules or capabilities change. Google reviews are governed by Google’s policies; in line with those policies, the Service never offers customers rewards in exchange for reviews.
8. Acceptable use
You agree not to use the Service to:
- send spam or messages to people who are not genuinely your customers or prospects with a lawful basis to be contacted;
- send unlawful, deceptive, offensive or harmful content;
- violate WhatsApp’s or any other platform’s terms of use; or
- interfere with, reverse engineer, or resell the Service without our written agreement.
9. Availability, changes, suspension and liability
- We aim to keep the Service available and reliable, but it is provided “as is” and we do not guarantee uninterrupted availability.
- We may improve or change features over time. If a change materially reduces the Service, we will tell subscribers in advance where reasonably possible.
- We may suspend or terminate access for serious or repeated breaches of these terms, including unlawful messaging. Where practical, we will warn you first.
- To the extent permitted by South African law, including the Consumer Protection Act where it applies, our liability for any claim relating to the Service is limited to the subscription fees you paid in the three months before the event giving rise to the claim. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.
10. General
- Intellectual property: the Service, its software, branding and content remain our property. Your business’s information and your customers’ information remain yours.
- Changes to these terms: we may update these terms; the current version and its effective date always appear on this page. Material changes will be communicated to registered users and subscribers.
- Governing law: these terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa.
- Contact: see the Contact page.