Consumer Rights Notice — Social Bounty

Introduction

This is a plain-English summary of your consumer rights when you use Social Bounty. It is written for the non-lawyer who wants to know, in real terms, what you are entitled to expect from us and what you can do if something goes wrong. It is not the whole of the law, and it does not replace the text of the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 (CPA), the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 (ECTA) or the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013 (POPIA). Where a right comes from a specific section, we cite it so you can look it up.

Social Bounty is operated by Social Bounty (Pty) Ltd (CIPC registration number 2026/301053/07), a South African private company with its registered address at 2 Alyth Road, Forest Town, Johannesburg, Gauteng, 2193, South Africa. When this notice says "we", "us" or "Social Bounty", that is who we mean.

If anything in this notice conflicts with a right the CPA gives you, the CPA wins. That is not a concession — section 48 of the CPA makes unfair, unjust or unreasonable terms void, and section 51 lists the terms that can never appear in a consumer agreement at all. We have tried to be careful about those, and we will not try to walk you out of rights you cannot sign away.

Who counts as a consumer

The CPA protects two groups of people who use Social Bounty:

Hunters — you are a natural person (an individual human being) who signs up to complete bounties and earn payouts. The CPA always applies to you in your dealings with us.
Small-business brands and individual brand users — you are a natural person who funds bounties on the platform, or you are a juristic person (a company, close corporation, partnership or trust) whose asset value or annual turnover is below the threshold currently set under the CPA (at the time of writing, R2 million). If you meet that test, the CPA applies to you as well.

If you are a larger business (above the R2 million threshold), the CPA does not apply to your use of Social Bounty. You still have the full protection of South African contract law, ECTA where we transact electronically, and POPIA for any personal information we hold about you or your staff.

Throughout this notice, when we say "you" we mean whichever of these categories applies to you.

You have a right to fair value, good quality and safety

Sections 54 to 61 of the CPA give you the right to services that are performed with reasonable skill, care and diligence, that are reasonably fit for the purpose they were supposed to serve, and that are delivered within a reasonable time. For a platform like ours that means:

Our website and app should work as described. If the payout rail, the submission flow or the verification layer is broken in a way that prevents you from getting value, you have the right to a remedy under section 54 — typically a refund, a re-performance or a credit, at your election, subject to what the CPA allows in the circumstances.
Where we take your money (a bounty budget or a subscription charge), you have the right to the corresponding service. If we fail to deliver, section 56 gives you the right to cancel and be repaid for the portion we failed to deliver.
Where we rely on a third-party processor — for example the social-media verification service we use to check submissions — we remain accountable to you under the CPA. You do not need to chase that third party yourself.

We will not pretend to give you a "warranty" shorter than the statutory six months that section 56 creates. If someone tries to sell you a clause that says otherwise on this platform, that clause is unenforceable.

You have a right to know what you are buying and what it costs

Sections 22 to 28 of the CPA give you the right to information in plain and understandable language, to accurate pricing, to an itemised account, and to a written record of the transaction. ECTA section 43 adds an online-specific layer: before you place an order on a website we have to tell you who we are, where we are, what you are buying, what it costs including all fees, and how to cancel.

In practice, that means on Social Bounty you have the right to:

See the total cost of a bounty — including any platform fee, payment-processing fee and, separately disclosed, the global 3.5% platform fee — before you confirm it.
See the rules for payout, approval and refund before you submit to a bounty, not after.
Receive a written record (in your account history and by email) of every charge, payout and refund that moves through your account.
Ask for anything we say to be explained again, in plainer language, if it is not clear the first time.

If you ever feel you did not get the information you needed before you committed, that is a complaint we want to hear. Email us at complaints@socialbounty.cash.

You have a right to fair, just and reasonable terms

Sections 48 to 52 of the CPA police the contents of consumer agreements:

Section 48 makes it unlawful for us to offer goods or services, or to enter into an agreement, on terms that are unfair, unreasonable or unjust. If a clause in our Terms does that, the clause is void.
Section 49 requires terms that limit our liability, that create risk for you or that require you to waive a right to be drawn to your attention in plain, understandable language — not buried.
Section 50 prohibits unconscionable conduct — using physical force, coercion, undue influence, pressure, duress, harassment or unfair tactics against you.
Section 51 sets out terms that can never appear in a consumer agreement. Among them: terms that ask you to waive any right you have under the CPA, that exempt us from liability for gross negligence, that assume facts about you which are not true, or that sign away the jurisdiction of the South African courts. None of those will appear in our documents. If you spot something that looks like one, please tell us and we will correct it.
Section 52 gives a court power to declare a term unconscionable, unjust or unreasonable and to refuse to enforce it. It also preserves your right to approach the National Consumer Commission directly — more on that below.

You have a right to honest dealing

Sections 40 to 47 of the CPA make it unlawful for us to use unfair tactics, to make false or misleading representations, to bait-and-switch you, or to charge a price other than the one we advertised. In the context of Social Bounty, that cashes out as:

We will not exaggerate what the platform does or what your odds of earning are.
We will not change the deal on you after you have started work on a bounty (for example, reducing the payout or adding a new requirement mid-flight) without clear, up-front consent and a right for you to withdraw.
We will not use dark patterns to push you into a subscription tier or an add-on you did not want.
Our marketing and our product copy will match the rules and fees that actually apply when you transact.

You have a right to accountability from us

Sections 53 to 61 of the CPA make suppliers accountable for the quality of the services they provide. If something on the platform goes wrong in a way that causes you loss, you have the right to ask us to put it right. Depending on the problem, the CPA allows for any combination of:

A refund of the fee paid.
Re-performance of the service — for example, re-running a submission verification if it failed for reasons on our side.
Repair of the defect where possible.
Replacement where a credit or an alternative is appropriate.

We note one specific case expressly: we operate an automated post-visibility check on approved content. What it does depends on whether the hunter has been paid yet. Before payout, if a hunter's approved post appears to have been taken down, the check can reverse the still-escrowed funds back to the brand. After payout, the released funds cannot be reversed — instead, a hunter who removes a required post becomes liable to repay the net amount they were paid, and a brand's recourse is the recovery Social Bounty pursues from that hunter (by netting their future earnings), not a guaranteed refund. The full rules are in clause 12 of the Terms of Service.

If you are a hunter and you believe a removal finding fired incorrectly on your content — the post is still live, the URL is reachable, the host platform removed it rather than you, or the scraper misread the page — you can contest the refund or the liability through our Complaints & Dispute Resolution process. That is a live, human route, not an automated reply, and where you are right we reverse the outcome and undo any set-off.

You have a right to be heard, and to escalate

Sections 69 to 76 of the CPA give you the right to complain and to have your complaint considered seriously, and they give you a specific escalation route to the National Consumer Commission (NCC) and the consumer tribunal. Importantly, section 52 of the CPA means we cannot contract you out of that route. Even if you have agreed to an internal complaints process, or to arbitration, or to any other mechanism, your right to approach the NCC directly remains intact.

We have written out our internal complaints process so you can use it if you want to. It is meant to be the quick route — most issues can be resolved at the support level. If it is not fixed to your satisfaction, the external channels remain open:

The National Consumer Commission at https://www.thencc.gov.za for CPA-type complaints.
The Information Regulator of South Africa at https://inforegulator.org.za for personal-information and POPIA complaints, or POPIAComplaints@inforegulator.org.za.
Voluntary arbitration under the Arbitration Foundation of Southern Africa (AFSA) if both you and we agree to use it — this is an alternative, not a substitute, for the NCC route.
The Gauteng Division of the High Court of South Africa for matters that fall outside the above.

Step-by-step details, our response-time commitments and the investigation process are set out in our Complaints & Dispute Resolution policy.

Cooling-off rights: what they are, and where they do not apply

South African law gives consumers a "cooling-off" right in two specific situations, and we want to be honest about which applies to Social Bounty.

ECTA section 44 — the general 7-day rule

Section 44 of ECTA gives a consumer who bought goods or services through an electronic transaction the right to cancel, without reason and without penalty, within seven (7) days of receiving the goods or concluding the services agreement, and to a refund within 30 days. That is a powerful right and we respect it. It is the default position for our subscription and platform-fee charges.

The carve-out for services you asked us to start

Section 42(2)(a) of ECTA carves a specific exception out of the 7-day rule: where the service has already begun with your express consent, and before the 7-day period is up, the cooling-off right does not apply to the portion of the service already rendered.

A lot of what happens on Social Bounty falls into this exception. When you fund a bounty and it goes live, when hunters submit work against it, and when verification runs against those submissions, real work has started. We cannot unring that bell. The fair position is:

For a bounty that has not yet gone live, you can cancel and receive a full refund. That is your ECTA s44 right and we honour it.
For a bounty that has gone live but has received no submissions and no verification work has run, you can cancel and receive a full refund, net of any bank or payment-processor fee that is non-recoverable.
For a bounty that has received submissions or incurred verification costs, we can refund the portion of the budget that is still uncommitted, but not the portion that has already been applied to work that is effectively done.
For subscription charges (Pro tier), you can cancel your subscription at any time; the ECTA 7-day cooling-off right applies to the initial charge.

We will not dress this up as a "no refunds" policy. It is an honest carve-out that tracks what the law actually says. If you disagree with how we have applied it in your case, that is a complaint and we will look at it.

How to exercise your rights

You do not need to quote sections of the CPA at us to be taken seriously. The easiest route is:

Email complaints@socialbounty.cash with what happened, when, and what you would like us to do about it. We will acknowledge within 3 business days and aim for a substantive response within 14 days.
For personal-information and data-subject rights requests (access, correction, deletion), see our Information Officer & Data Subject Rights page.
If our internal response does not fix the issue, you can escalate to the NCC or Information Regulator. You do not need our permission to do that.