The deal, in plain words

1. What you are getting

A licence to use COWE — not a copy of it. It is non-exclusive, non-transferable and revocable, it lasts as long as your subscription and no longer, and it covers your own business use and your team's.

COWE stays ours. The software, the engine, the connector library, the blueprints, the designs and the name are our property and remain so. Nothing here transfers ownership of any of it, and nothing here is open source.

What you make stays yours. The workflows you build, the data you route and the credentials you connect are yours. We claim no ownership over them and use them only to run the service for you — see the privacy policy.

2. What you may not do

Most of this is what you would assume. We are spelling it out because the consequence in section 3 is sharp.

• Do not reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble COWE, or try to derive its source, except where the law says you may regardless of what a contract states.
• Do not work around the controls. Plan limits, credit metering, entitlement checks, rate limits and licence validation are part of what you agreed to. Evading them, tampering with them, or misreporting usage is a breach — whatever the method.
• Do not attack the platform or hunt for holes in it outside section 4. That includes probing other tenants' boundaries, escaping the script sandbox, trying to reach data that is not yours, and load-testing us without asking.
• Do not resell, sublicense, rent or run COWE as a service for others unless we have agreed that in writing.
• Do not use it against the law, to send unsolicited bulk mail, to infringe someone's rights, or to process data you have no right to process.
• Do not share one account between people to avoid paying for seats. Your plan includes a number of seats, and each one beyond them is charged in credits.

3. What happens if you do

For ordinary breaches we will tell you what is wrong and give you a reasonable chance to put it right.

For the three in bold below, your licence can be suspended or revoked immediately and without notice, because by the time we are talking about it the damage is either done or ongoing:

• Circumventing a control — metering, entitlements, limits or licensing.
• Abusing the platform — deliberately degrading it for other customers, or using it to harm someone.
• Exploiting a weakness — acting on a flaw you found instead of reporting it, or reaching for data that was never yours.

Revocation ends your right to use COWE at once. We will still give you a reasonable window to export your data, unless doing so would itself put other customers at risk. Fees already paid are not refunded where we ended the agreement for one of these reasons.

4. Found a flaw? We would rather you told us

Section 3 is aimed at people acting in bad faith, not at people who notice something. If you find a security problem and report it to security@coweserv.co.za before doing anything else with it, we will treat that as help, not as a breach.

What good faith looks like: stop as soon as you have shown the problem exists, take no more data than proves it, do not degrade the service for anyone else, do not use another customer's data, and give us reasonable time to fix it before telling the world. Do that and we will not pursue you.

5. Paying, and changing your mind

Subscriptions are billed in advance, monthly or annually, on the plan you pick. Compute credits are included with your plan and reset when it renews; credits you buy on top of that are bought outright and carry over.

Fourteen-day money back. If COWE is not for you, tell us within 14 days of your first paid subscription and we will refund that payment in full. No forms, no interrogation. It applies to your first subscription, once — not to renewals, and not to credit top-ups you have already spent.

After that, cancelling stops the next renewal and you keep what you have paid for until the period ends. Move down a plan and we refund the unused part of the current period as credits. Prices can change; if yours does, we tell you before the renewal it affects, and you can leave instead.

Fail to pay and we may suspend the service after telling you. Nothing is deleted for non-payment until the retention period on your plan has run.

6. Sold as it is, and still being built

COWE is provided "as is". We work hard on it and we are proud of it, but we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or fit for a purpose you have not discussed with us. To the fullest extent the law allows, warranties not written down here are excluded.

It will keep changing. We ship continuously — features get added, refined and occasionally retired. That is the deal with a product still growing, and we would rather say so than pretend the version you sign up to is the version you keep. Where we remove something you rely on, we give at least 30 days' notice and, where we can, a way to move across.

What we commit to on availability, support and recovery is on the service commitments page.

Nothing here limits anything that cannot lawfully be limited — including your rights under the Consumer Protection Act where it applies to you. Subject to that, our total liability in any twelve-month period is capped at what you paid us in it, and neither of us is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss.

7. Your side of the bargain

You are responsible for the accounts you create, the credentials you connect and what your workflows do with them. COWE acts on the instructions your workflows encode; it cannot know whether you were entitled to give them.

So: have the right to process the data you route, keep your keys and your sign-in safe, and tell us promptly if an account is compromised. Where you are processing other people's personal data, the obligations in the privacy policy for a responsible party are yours.

8. Endings

You can stop whenever you like, from the billing page. We can end the agreement for a material breach you do not fix, immediately for anything in section 3, or on 90 days' notice if we ever discontinue the service — in which case we refund the unused part of what you have paid.

Whichever way it ends, you can export your data during the retention window your plan gives you. After that it is deleted, and if you hold your own encryption key you can make it unreadable yourself, immediately, without asking us.

9. The legal footing

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa, and the courts of South Africa have jurisdiction. If a clause turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.

We may update these terms. For anything that materially affects you we give 30 days' notice by email and on this page; carrying on using COWE after that is acceptance, and if you would rather not, you can cancel and take a pro-rata refund of the unused period.

Questions: legal@coweserv.co.za.