Terms of Service

1. Who we are and what these terms cover

These terms are an agreement between Obelisk Property Investments (Pty) Ltd, trading as Obel AI & Quality, a private company registered in South Africa with registration number 2015/342921/07, of 23 Allen Drive, Bellville, Cape Town, 7530, South Africa ("Obel", "we", "us"), and the organisation that subscribes to Obel-MS ("you"). Our email address is chat@obel-ai.com, and legal notices can be served at the address above.

Obel-MS is for business use. If you accept these terms for an organisation, you confirm that you may bind that organisation. An order form that we both sign takes priority over these terms where the two differ.

2. The service

Obel-MS is a hosted quality management system. It includes External Document Control on every plan and Workflow Manager on the Professional plan. We host it, maintain it, back it up, update it and support it. Features marked "coming soon" are not part of your subscription until we release them.

Obel-MS supports ISO 9001 compliance. Certification is issued to your organisation by an accredited certification body. We do not certify anyone and we do not guarantee a certification result.

3. Plans and limits

Each plan has limits, which the pricing page shows at the time of your order:

• named users, plus unlimited read-only viewers;
• pages a month for AI metadata extraction and OCR;
• document storage;
• support time included.

When you reach the page limit in a month, Obel-MS still stores your documents, but AI extraction and OCR stop until the next month. You can move up a plan or ask us for a volume price. When you reach the storage limit, you can buy extra storage or move up a plan.

4. Ordering and payment

Our order process is conducted by our online reseller Paddle.com. Paddle.com is the Merchant of Record for all our orders. Paddle provides all customer service inquiries and handles returns.

Paddle charges you, collects any VAT, GST or sales tax, and sends your invoices. The checkout shows the full amount, including tax, before you pay. The Paddle Buyer Terms apply to your purchase in addition to these terms. Where we invoice you directly by agreement, you pay by bank transfer within the time on the invoice.

Prices on our website exclude VAT, GST and sales tax.

5. Renewal, price changes and cancellation

• Your subscription renews automatically at the end of each monthly or annual period until you cancel it. For an annual subscription, we remind you by email at least 30 days before it renews.
• You can cancel at any time in the billing portal or by email. The cancellation takes effect at the end of the period you have paid for.
• We tell you about a price change at least 30 days before it applies. It applies from your next renewal, and you can cancel before then.
• Refunds follow our Refund Policy.

6. Onboarding

The Essentials and Professional plans have a once-off onboarding fee. It covers the hours and the work shown on the pricing page, such as a document import and remote training sessions. It does not renew. Further work is charged at our remote consulting rate. The Refund Policy says when an onboarding fee is refundable.

7. Your data

You own the documents, records and other data that you put in Obel-MS ("your data"). You give us the right to host, copy and process your data only to provide, support and secure the service for you. We do not sell your data, and we do not use it to train AI models.

You are responsible for the content of your data and for having the right to put it in Obel-MS, including any personal information about your staff, suppliers or customers.

8. Data processing terms

For personal information in your data, you are the responsible party (POPIA) or controller (GDPR and UK GDPR), and we are your operator or processor. We:

• process it only on your documented instructions, which are these terms and your use of Obel-MS;
• make sure that our staff and contractors who can access it are bound to confidentiality;
• protect it with the security measures described on our security page, including encryption at rest and in transit;
• use only the sub-processors on our sub-processor page (/legal/sub-processors), tell you at least 30 days before we add or replace one, and let you object; if we cannot resolve an objection, you can cancel and receive a refund of any prepaid fees for the unused period;
• tell you without undue delay, and within 72 hours where we can, after we become aware of a security incident that affects your personal information;
• help you answer requests from people who exercise their data protection rights, and give you the information you need to show compliance;
• return or delete your data when the subscription ends, as section 15 describes.

Where personal information is transferred out of the country where it was collected, we use the safeguards that the law requires, such as standard contractual clauses. If your team sets up an integration, such as a webhook or Power Automate, Obel-MS sends the data you choose to the destination you choose; that destination is your own processor, not ours. A signed data processing agreement with these terms is available on request.

9. Hosting region

You choose the Google Cloud region for your workspace when you order. Our standard regions are South Africa (Johannesburg), European Union (Belgium), United States (Iowa) and Australia (Sydney). UK workspaces use the EU region unless you ask for London. Other regions are available on request, with a one-off setup fee.

Your documents, records and backups stay in that region. The sub-processors listed in our privacy notice can process some data elsewhere, for example to send email or, if you choose it, for AI processing.

10. AI processing

External AI processing is off unless you choose it for your workspace. If you choose it, document text, and page images of pages that our own text recognition cannot read, go to OpenAI through its API, and OpenAI processes them in the United States by default. OpenAI does not use API data to train its models, and it keeps it for up to 30 days for abuse monitoring. You can switch AI processing off at any time. Without it, extraction runs on our own servers in your hosting region.

AI suggestions can be wrong. A person in your team checks and approves each suggestion before it becomes part of a record. You stay responsible for the content of your records.

11. Availability and support

We aim for 99.5% availability each month. This is a target, not a guarantee. We plan maintenance outside working hours where we can and tell you about it in advance. Support is by email, with the response times and the support time of your plan.

12. Acceptable use

You and your users must not:

• use Obel-MS for anything unlawful, or upload content that you have no right to use;
• upload malware, or try to break, overload, probe or bypass the security of the service;
• copy, resell or reverse-engineer the service, or give access to people outside your organisation except read-only viewers you invite;
• share user accounts between people.

You are responsible for your users and for keeping their sign-in details safe.

13. Our intellectual property

Obel-MS, its software, templates, designs and documentation belong to us or our licensors. During your subscription we give you a non-exclusive, non-transferable right for your users to use Obel-MS for your organisation. If you send us ideas or feedback, we can use them without any obligation to you.

14. Suspension

We can suspend access if a payment is more than 14 days late after we remind you, or if your use puts the service or other customers at risk. We may first limit the workspace to read-only. We tell you first unless the risk is urgent, and we restore access when the cause is fixed. Suspension does not delete your data.

15. When the subscription ends

When your subscription ends, your workspace becomes read-only for 30 days. During that time your users can open and download your documents and reports, and on request we send you a full export of your data (your documents and a database export) at no charge. A second or custom export is charged at our remote consulting rate.

After those 30 days we delete your data from the live system, and it leaves our backups within 90 days, unless the law requires us to keep it.

Either of us can end the subscription with immediate effect if the other seriously breaches these terms and does not fix the breach within 30 days after a written notice.

16. Confidentiality

Each of us keeps the other’s confidential information secret and uses it only for this agreement. This does not apply to information that is public, that the other party already had, or that the law requires us to disclose. We do not name you as a customer in public without your written permission.

20. Events outside our control

Neither of us is liable for a delay or failure caused by events outside reasonable control, such as a failure of a cloud provider, the power grid or the internet, a natural disaster or a strike. We tell you about the event and do our best to limit its effect.

21. Changes to these terms

We can change these terms. We tell you about an important change at least 30 days before it applies. If you do not agree, you can cancel before the change applies.

22. General

• These terms, your order and our Refund Policy are the whole agreement between us about Obel-MS.
• If a court finds part of these terms invalid, the rest stays in force.
• If one of us does not enforce a right at once, that party does not give up the right.
• You can transfer this agreement only with our written consent. We can transfer it to a company that takes over Obel-MS, and we tell you if we do.
• Notices under these terms can be sent by email to the addresses we each use for the account.

23. Law and disputes

The law of South Africa applies to these terms. We first try to settle a dispute by talking to each other. If that fails, the High Court of South Africa, Western Cape Division, Cape Town, can hear the dispute. Consumer protection law in your country still applies where it cannot be excluded by agreement.

24. Contact

Questions about these terms: chat@obel-ai.com.