Terms of Service

1. Using JoynUs

By using JoynUs, you agree to use the service lawfully and responsibly. You are responsible for the content of your invitations and for obtaining appropriate consent from your guests to process their data.

JoynUs is provided as-is.

Our privacy policy and our data pledge say what we do with personal information and what we will never do with it. They are part of how the service works, not marketing copy.

2. The partner program, and who the agreement is with

These partner clauses are a draft, not the final agreement. They are written to describe exactly how the partner program works in the product today, and nobody with a legal qualification has read them yet. So please do not rely on this section in the meantime: if you need the commercial terms in writing before you buy a pack, email us and we will send you what we can stand behind. Section 10 lists the clauses that are still missing, and leaves them visibly empty rather than filled in with something that sounds right.

A partner is a coordinator, designer or planning agency whose JoynUs account we have approved as one. Partner status is granted by hand, so it is not something you can sign up for, and it is described in full in the Partner guide inside the product.

It is free to join. There is no subscription, no joining fee and nothing recurring. The only thing a partner ever pays us for is a pack of event credits.

The pack purchase is the transaction, and it is with you

When you buy a pack of event credits, that purchase is between JoynUs and you. You are the payer of record: the checkout is opened in your name, the invoice is issued to you, and the record we keep of the payment names you and your billing details rather than any client of yours.

What you charge your own client is between you and them. It does not pass through JoynUs. We do not invoice your client for your work, we take no share of what you charge, and we are not a party to that arrangement.

Spending a credit on a client's event later is not a second sale. It produces a line in your credit history and no invoice at all, because nothing changes hands at that moment. The money moved when you bought the pack.

3. Credits

One credit settles one event, once. Not per guest, and nothing to renew. You cannot be charged twice for the same event: a double-clicked Publish, a request retried behind the scenes, and unpublishing and publishing again all resolve to the one credit already spent on that event.

Credits are bought in advance, in packs, at a wholesale price. A pack that has been bought is never repriced afterwards: its credit count, its price and its currency are fixed at the moment of purchase, and if we change our prices we add a new pack and retire the old one.

Credits do not expire. We do not put an end date on a credit, so a pack bought this season is still spendable next season. That is our undertaking to you rather than a mechanism: nothing in the platform counts a credit down or ages one out.

Your balance is your credit history added up, and nothing else. Every movement is a line: each pack credited, each event settled, and anything granted or corrected by hand. Those lines are never edited or deleted. A correction is a second line that offsets the first, so a mistake always shows up as two entries rather than as one entry that quietly changed.

Two limits worth stating plainly, because both follow from how credits work rather than from a rule we chose to add. There is no way to move credits from one partner account to another. And the only thing a credit does is settle an event on JoynUs: there is no mechanism in the platform that turns one back into money. Whether you can ask us for your money back is a different question, and it is section 6.

4. Who pays for an event

Most events cost nothing. An event within the free guest limit publishes with no payment and no credit. Over that limit, publishing has to be settled: either by one of a partner's credits, or by the event's owner paying the one-time fee.

Which events can draw on your credits

Only an event attributed to your partner account, and that happens in one of two ways: you created the event yourself while your partner account was active, or you accepted a coordinator invitation to a client's own event that had no partner on it yet. Accepting a designer invitation deliberately does not attribute the event to you, so a design job never spends your credit on somebody else's wedding. Attribution happens once and does not move afterwards, including if the event changes owner.

A credit is only ever taken while your partner account is active and your balance is at least one. Otherwise the event falls back to its owner paying, exactly as an event with no partner does.

The choice is the partner's, not the host's

Whether a given event is settled by a partner's credit or paid for by the host is the partner's side of the arrangement. A host is never shown a partner's balance and has no way to spend, withhold or transfer a partner's credits. This asymmetry is deliberate: the credits were bought by the partner, under the agreement in section 2.

Which is exactly why the two of you should agree, before the event is published, on who is paying for it. If no credit settles an event, the platform asks its owner to pay, and a host who was told the event was covered will not enjoy finding that out at a checkout page.

A partner cannot pay for a client's event on their own card. Only the event's owner can. That is not a permissions preference: the invoice records who paid and is kept for years, so the payer on it has to be the account owner rather than their planner. Buy credits if you want to carry the cost of a client's event.

5. Buying a pack

Payment goes through Stripe. You enter your card and your billing details there, and Stripe asks for a billing address and will take a tax number if you have one, so the invoice comes out correctly the first time. Your card details are never sent to us and we do not hold them.

A purchase is recorded before you reach Stripe, so abandoning a checkout leaves an unpaid line in your purchase list and nothing is charged.

Credits are added when Stripe confirms the payment to us, which is normally a few seconds after the card goes through, and not at the moment you press pay.

If what arrives does not match what was quoted, an amount below the quote, a currency we did not quote in, or an amount we cannot read, we still record and invoice the payment and we hold the credits for a person to look at. Your receipt page says so, and there is nothing to pay again. Paying at or above the quoted price is always honoured.

On a deployment where card payment is not switched on, we do not draw a Buy button that cannot work. Each pack offers an email to us instead, and we arrange payment and add the credits by hand.

6. Refunds and corrections

There is no self-serve refund. Nothing in the partner area cancels a purchase, returns a credit or reverses a spend, and we would rather say that than imply a button exists.

What actually happens is that a person does it. If a credit was spent on the wrong event, or a payment needs putting right, email us and we correct it by hand. A correction is made by adding an offsetting line to your credit history, never by editing it, so both the original and the correction stay visible in the record your balance rests on.

This draft deliberately does not set out a cooling-off period, a refund window or a right to cancel, and it must not be read as denying one either. South African consumer law, including the Consumer Protection Act, may give you rights here that we have not written down, so this is one of the parts that needs review before anybody relies on it. In the meantime, ask us.

7. Partner status, and suspension

Partner status is granted by hand rather than by signing up, and that is also when any welcome credits are handed over.

We can suspend a partner account. While an account is suspended:

• the partner area is closed, so the partner page, the credit history and the partner guide are not available;
• no pack can be bought;
• no credit is spent, so an over-limit event goes back to its owner to pay, exactly as an event with no partner does;
• no further events are attributed to the account.

A suspension does not delete anything. The credit history and the balance it explains are untouched, because that history is a financial record.

One thing a suspension never does: withhold the receipt for money we have already taken. A receipt for a purchase you paid for stays reachable while you are signed in, even if your partner account is suspended in between paying and coming back to it.

This draft does not set out grounds for suspension or a notice period. That gap is deliberate rather than an oversight, and it is the kind of clause section 10 is about.

8. Invoices, and the records we keep

A pack purchase writes an invoice record. It snapshots what was bought, the amount and currency of the payment, the payer's email address, the billing name, address and tax number given at Stripe, the date of payment, and the Stripe references needed to trace it. Snapshots rather than live links, so the record still reads correctly years later. If a payment ever reaches us with no readable amount on it, the record carries the amount quoted instead, and that is one of the cases where the credits are held for a person to look at.

That record is kept even after the event and the account are gone. When an event or an account is deleted, the invoice's link to the event is removed and the invoice itself stays, for the statutory financial-record period, which in South Africa runs to between five and seven years under SARS and Companies Act requirements. POPIA permits this expressly: section 14 allows a record to be retained where another law requires it. Along with the credit history below, it is what stays behind when everything else about an event is purged.

Your receipt page links to the Stripe invoice and its PDF. Those links open without a login and carry your billing address and tax number, so treat them as private and do not forward them.

A credit spend writes no invoice, as section 2 says. It writes a line in your credit history, and that line keeps the event's title as it was at the time, so it still reads after the event has been deleted and you can still reconcile what your credits went on. Nothing else about the event is kept there.

So an event title is kept indefinitely, and here is how we treat it. A title such as "Dov and Rivka" is retained on both of those financial records: on the invoice for a payment, and on the credit history line for a credit spent. We do not treat an event title as identifying on its own. It is text a host wrote, in the ordinary case no more than a pair of given names, and neither record links it to a guest or to anybody else. The field is free text, so a host can of course type a surname or a full name into it: our position is about how the platform treats the field, not a claim about what it can hold. Worth knowing when you name an event.

9. Your clients, and their guests

Under POPIA the host is the responsible party for their guests' personal information, and JoynUs is the operator processing it on the host's instructions. A partner working on a client's event is working on that host's event, and what they can see there is the host's.

What a partner can see is decided entirely by the role they hold on each event, and the roles differ on purpose:

• a coordinator or co-host helps run the event and reaches the guest list, the RSVP answers, exports, the seating plan and sending;
• a designer reaches the invitation itself and never sees the guest list, anyone's contact details, the RSVP answers, or any export, and cannot send anything to a guest.

The RSVP answers contain health information. Guests type dietary requirements, allergies and access needs into those free-text fields, and POPIA treats that as special personal information. A coordinator can see it, because coordinating the catering is precisely why the host asked. A designer cannot see it at all. If you hold a coordinator or co-host role on a client's event, you are handling that category of information.

Three further things that are true of every partner, whatever their role:

• the partner page itself renders no guest data of any kind, not names, not contact details, and not a headcount, not even a total;
• every guest email carries an unsubscribe link, and an address that has unsubscribed is skipped on every later send across the platform. Neither a host nor a partner can override that;
• anything uploaded to an invitation is served from a public link, so only upload imagery and music the host owns or has permission to use.

What POPIA makes a partner in their own right, an operator working under the host, or a responsible party for records of their own, is not settled in this draft. It is a question for a lawyer and this page does not answer it.

10. Clauses not written yet

The headings below are empty on purpose. Each is a clause where a confident-sounding guess would be worse than a visible gap, so nothing is stated until a lawyer has drafted it. If any of these matters to a decision you are about to make, ask us first.

Governing law

Not stated yet.

Limitation of liability

Not stated yet.

Indemnity

Not stated yet.

Disputes and jurisdiction

Not stated yet.

11. Contact

Contact us at [email protected] with any questions.

Anything about a payment, a pack, a balance that looks wrong, or a client who should not have been charged goes to the same address, and it reaches a person.