Terms of service

1. Who we are

1.1 Umbel is operated by South Design (Pty) Ltd, trading as Umbel, registration number 2025/343417/07, a private company registered in South Africa.

1.2 Our business address, and our address for service of legal documents, is 32 Kloof St, Gardens, Cape Town, 8000, South Africa.

1.3 Our email address is info@umbel.me, and the Service is at umbel.me.

2. Definitions

2.1 "Umbel", "we" and "us" mean South Design (Pty) Ltd, trading as Umbel.

2.2 "the Service" means Umbel's website, apps and API.

2.3 "a Card" means a digital business card you publish on Umbel, with the page, QR code, contact file, wallet pass and preview image it is published as.

2.4 "a Handle" means the address your Cards are published under, umbel.me/@you.

2.5 "a Team" means a group account on a Team plan, and "a Team card" a Card it owns.

2.6 "Pro" and "Team" are the paid plans on our pricing page, and "a plan" means any plan, free or paid.

2.7 "you" means the account holder, and any business you hold the account for.

3. What the Service is

3.1 Umbel publishes a digital business card at your Handle, shared by link, QR code, a tap on an NFC tag or a wallet pass. It also collects contacts through a Card, reads photographed paper cards, imports contact lists, and gives a Team templates and assigned Cards.

3.2 Our privacy policy, at umbel.me/legal/privacy, says how we handle personal information. We never receive your payment card details.

4. Agreement and eligibility

4.1 These terms are the agreement between you and us, and creating an account binds you to them.

4.2 You must be 18 or older. We close an account we find belongs to a person under 18.

4.3 If you use the Service for an employer or a client, you warrant that you have their authority to agree to these terms.

4.4 Clause 13 binds anyone who opens a Card, with or without an account.

5. Your account

5.1 You must keep your password confidential and the email address on your account current.

5.2 You must tell us without delay if somebody else has access to your account.

5.3 You are responsible for everything done under your account, and for what the people you invite to a Team do with the access you give them.

6. Handles and card names

6.1 A Handle is yours while your account is open, and is taken until you change or delete it. An old Handle or card name redirects to its replacement until its owner re-points it.

6.2 You must not take a Handle to impersonate anybody, to pass yourself off, or to hold for resale.

6.3 We may reclaim a Handle taken in breach of clause 6.2, one that infringes a trade mark, and one used to mislead.

6.4 A Handle is never reused. We keep an anonymised record of a closed account, so no Handle it held can be taken by anybody else.

7. Your content

7.1 You keep ownership of everything you put on a Card, and you warrant that you have the right to publish it.

7.2 You grant us a licence to store it, resize a picture, show a Card to whoever opens its address, and build the files a Card is published as. The licence covers nothing else.

7.3 The licence ends when you delete the content or close your account. It does not reach copies other people have saved.

8. Your Card is public

8.1 A Card is a public page. Anyone with its address may open it, without an account and without notice to you, and the same details travel in its QR code, contact file and wallet pass.

8.2 Card pages are not listed in search engines, and clause 13 forbids automated collection from them.

8.3 We cannot promise that nobody will copy what is on a Card. Publish only what you are willing to publish.

9. Contacts and other people's information

9.1 Contacts your Cards collect, paper cards you photograph and lists you import are yours. We process them on your instruction and delete them when you do.

9.2 Under the Protection of Personal Information Act you are the responsible party for those records and we are your operator.

9.3 You warrant, for every contact, that you may lawfully give it to us and have a lawful ground for keeping it.

9.4 Marketing to your contacts is yours to get right, including the consent the law requires before an electronic marketing message.

9.5 We do not market to your contacts, sell them or disclose them. Contacts collected through a Team card belong to the Team.

10. Teams

10.1 A Card is owned by the person or the Team that created it, and ownership never changes.

10.2 A Team's Owner and Admins may create Cards, assign a Card to a member, fill one in, archive one, and see the contacts and statistics its Cards collect.

10.3 A Team template sets the look of its Cards and which parts each Card fills in. Whether the member holding a Card may edit it is one setting on that Card.

10.4 When a member leaves a Team, their Team cards are archived and unassigned, and the Team keeps them.

10.5 Whoever buys a Team plan is liable for its fees and seats.

11. Acceptable use

11.1 You must not use the Service to impersonate anybody, to deceive the people who open your Card, to phish or to distribute malware.

11.2 You must not publish unlawful material, material you have no right to publish, or sexual or violent material on a Card.

11.3 You must not use a Card's share-back form to send anybody what they did not ask for.

11.4 You must not probe, overload or interfere with the Service, and you must not resell it.

12. Fair use

12.1 Each plan limits storage, contacts, card scans and the traffic your Cards may take.

12.2 We will tell you before a limit affects you. Working around one is a breach of these terms.

13. Automated access and collection

13.1 Permission to view a Card is not permission to collect it. Automated collection is prohibited except through an interface Umbel publishes for that purpose, on that interface's terms.

13.2 You must not use automated means, including a script, bot, crawler, scraper or data mining tool, against a Card page, our API, or the addresses a Card's contact file and wallet pass are served from.

13.3 You must not extract, aggregate, store, resell or republish what is on Cards in bulk, or use it to build a competing product.

13.4 You must not work around a block, a rate limit, a challenge or an instruction in our robots file.

13.5 The operators of public search engines have our revocable permission to index our website's pages. It does not extend to caches, archives or Card pages.

13.6 We may block an address, rate limit it or require it to pass a challenge, without notice.

13.7 This clause binds anyone who opens a Card, with or without an Umbel account.

14. Suspension, removal and appeal

14.1 We may remove a Card, suspend an account or close an account that breaches these terms, and we will tell you what we have done and why unless the law prevents us.

14.2 While we investigate a complaint about a Card we may stop it resolving, so its address shows nothing.

14.3 You may appeal in writing to info@umbel.me, and a person will review the decision.

15. Plans

15.1 One Card is free. A paid plan adds Cards and features, as set out on our pricing page, at prices that include value added tax where it applies.

15.2 On a downgrade or a lapse, anything over the new plan's limits stops being published until it is within them. Nothing is deleted.

16. Payment, renewal and price changes

16.1 A plan bought on our website is sold by Polar as merchant of record, which is the seller for that purchase and invoices you.

16.2 A plan bought in the Umbel app is sold by Apple or by Google. It renews through that store, is cancelled there and not by us, and its price there may differ.

16.3 A paid plan renews automatically for the period you chose, at the price in force when it renews, until it is cancelled.

16.4 We will give you 30 days' notice of a price change on a plan you hold, and you may cancel before it takes effect.

17. Cancellation and refunds

17.1 You may cancel at any time. Cancellation stops the next renewal, the plan runs to the end of the period you have paid for, and we do not refund part of a period.

17.2 The seven days to cancel that section 44 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act gives a consumer does not apply to a service you asked us to begin at once, and a plan begins when you buy it.

17.3 You keep every right the Consumer Protection Act gives you, including the right to cancel a fixed-term agreement on notice.

17.4 Deleting your account ends a plan bought on our website straight away, with no refund for the time left.

17.5 A plan bought in the app is refunded by Apple or by Google under that store's rules. We can neither refund nor cancel it.

18. Your record of the transaction

18.1 An invoice for a plan bought on our website comes from Polar, from the billing portal, while your account is open.

18.2 An invoice for a purchase made in the app comes from Apple or from Google.

19. Closing your account

19.1 You may close your account under Account, then Privacy, or by writing to info@umbel.me from the address on the account. If you own a Team, make somebody else its Owner or delete the Team first.

19.2 Closing your account deletes your account, your Cards and your contacts: gone from the live service at once, and from backups and logs within 30 days. Your Cards stop resolving at once, and wallet passes already on a phone stop being updated.

19.3 Your Handle is never reused, as clause 6.4 says, and Cards owned by a Team stay with the Team.

19.4 We keep the record of what you paid, without your name or email address, for seven years, as the law asks of a business's records.

19.5 Closing your account does not cancel a plan bought in the app. Cancel that in the App Store or in Google Play.

20. Our intellectual property

20.1 Umbel's name, software, designs and built-in templates are ours.

20.2 You may use them to use the Service and for nothing else. You must not copy them, reverse engineer them or build a competing product from them.

21. Changes to the Service

21.1 We may add, change or remove features, and we will tell you before we remove one you rely on.

21.2 We do not undertake that the Service will be uninterrupted. A feature we describe as new or unfinished is provided as it stands.

24. Termination

24.1 We may suspend or close your account if your use of the Service puts it or the people on it at risk, or if we are required to.

24.2 Where either of us is in material breach of these terms, the other gives written notice and 14 days to remedy it before terminating.

24.3 Either of us may terminate at once on the other's insolvency, and we may close an account at once for misuse serious enough to warrant it.

24.4 If we close your account for a reason other than your breach, we refund the unused part of the period you paid for.

25. Apple and Google

25.1 Apple is not a party to these terms, has no obligation to support the Service, and is not responsible for a claim you have about it. Apple may enforce this clause.

25.2 A purchase made in a store is also governed by that store's own terms.

26. Complaints, law and jurisdiction

26.1 Write to info@umbel.me with a complaint and we will answer it.

26.2 These terms are governed by the law of South Africa, and its courts have jurisdiction over any dispute. This does not remove a right you have where you live.

26.3 Whatever this clause says, you may take a consumer complaint to the National Consumer Commission, and one about personal information to the Information Regulator of South Africa.

27. Changes to these terms

27.1 We will give you 30 days' notice, on this page and by email, of a change to these terms that affects you. Using the Service after it takes effect accepts the new terms, and if you do not accept it, close your account.

27.2 The date above is the day these terms last changed. We keep the earlier wording and will send it to you on request.