Your seven-day cooling-off right
Section 44 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 gives you the right to cancel an electronic transaction within seven days of concluding it, without giving a reason and without penalty. You do not have to justify it to us, and we will not ask you to.
The only amount you can be charged is the direct cost of returning anything supplied, which for a website is nothing. We refund the full amount within 30 days of the cancellation.
You can also build and publish your whole site without paying anything, so in practice you will have used the product before the cooling-off clock even starts.
How to cancel
- From your dashboard: open Billing and cancel there.
- By email: write to info@qaculture.co.za from the address on your account and say you are cancelling.
Either is enough. We will confirm in writing, and that confirmation is your record.
Cancelling after the cooling-off period
You can cancel a plan at any time. Under section 14 of the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 you may cancel a fixed-term agreement on 20 business days' notice, and we will not charge more than a reasonable cancellation penalty where one applies.
- Both sides buy the same way: a single payment covering a fixed number of months, priced so that the longer the term the less it works out per month.
- Cancel part-way and we refund the whole months still to run, less any reasonable cancellation charge we have told you about in advance. We do not refund months you have already had the service for.
- Your site does NOT come down. Publishing is free on every account, so a plan ending changes what you can do — the budget tracker and free messaging stop — and not whether your page is online.
We do not refund service you have already had
A refund covers the part of your term you have not used. It does not cover the part you have. If you cancel six months into a twelve-month plan, we refund the six months still to run — the budget tracker, the filters and the free messaging were all there for the six months already gone.
We count in whole months from the date we receive your cancellation, and we round in your favour: a month already begun is not charged to you twice, and a month you have not entered is always refunded.
The month you are in runs to its end. Cancelling does not switch anything off that day: you keep the plan for the rest of the current month, because you have paid for it, and the refund for the months after it is worked out and paid once that month closes. Nothing further is ever charged. You are never left paying for a month you did not want, and you are never cut off inside one you did.
- Twelve-month plan, cancelled at month six: six months refunded.
- Twelve-month plan, cancelled at month eleven: one month refunded.
- Twelve-month plan, cancelled in the last month: nothing left to refund.
- Within seven days of paying — the ECT Act cooling-off period, not the free trial: everything is refunded, whatever the term. That right is not affected by any of this.
This is why: a longer term is cheaper per month than a shorter one. Without this, an eighteen-month price could be taken, used for the wedding, and cancelled the week after — which would mean the couples who stay are paying for the ones who do not. Section 14(3)(b) of the Consumer Protection Act lets us charge a reasonable cancellation penalty for exactly that reason, and keeping the value of the months you actually used is what we do instead of one. A couple's plan is a once-off purchase rather than a subscription, so section 14 does not reach it in the same way — we apply the same rule anyway, because it is the fair one and we would rather not argue about which statute says so.
If your circumstances are genuinely difficult — a wedding called off, a bereavement — write to us anyway. This page is the rule; we would rather hear from you than apply it blind.
What happens to your site
A paid plan ending does not take your site down. Publishing is free, so the page stays exactly where it is on the same address — what ends is the budget tracker, the marketplace filters and free messaging.
There is one thing that does delete an account, and it is not a payment. An account is kept for as long as it is used. If nobody signs in to a free account for 90 days, and the wedding date has already passed or was never set, the account and everything in it — your site, your photographs, your guest list and your vendor choices — is permanently deleted and cannot be recovered.
We write to you first: a notice 14 days before the date and a final one 7 days before it, and nothing is ever deleted without both of those letters having gone. Signing in from time to time is all it takes to keep an account.
Either way, export before the date. The Account page in your dashboard gives you a JSON file of your account, your site details, your guest list and your vendor choices, plus links to your photographs, which download separately. It is a copy of your data, not a working copy of your website — there is nothing in it you could put online elsewhere.
Credits are not refundable
Credits are not refundable. Money paid for credits is not returned — not for credits you have spent, and not for credits sitting unspent in your account either. There is no cash-out, no partial refund and no exchange. We say this on the pack itself, beside the price, and not only here.
Credits do not expire. They stay on your account until you use them.
Returning credits to your account is a different thing from a refund, and we are careful not to call it one. When you write to a vendor your credits are HELD, not spent. If the vendor has not opened your message within 48 hours, or if you take the enquiry back before they do, those credits go back into your available balance. That happens inside your account and no money moves. It is not a refund and it does not stop credits being non-refundable.
Once a vendor HAS opened your enquiry the credits are spent — whether or not they then reply helpfully, and whether or not you book them. What you bought was the vendor's attention, not their answer. That is the honest boundary and it is the most likely thing to feel unfair, so it is stated rather than buried.
When we do not refund
If we suspend or close your account because you breached our terms or our acceptable use policy — abuse, threats, explicit content, anything unlawful — what is left of your plan is not refunded. This is the one exception to everything above, and it is the only one. It is not a penalty for cancelling; it is what happens when the agreement ends because it was broken.
Your seven-day cooling-off right under the ECT Act is unaffected even then, because it is given by statute and not by us.
When we refund without being asked
- If we close your account for a reason that is not your breach of our terms, we refund the unused portion.
- If we materially reduce what your plan includes and you do not want to continue, you may cancel and we refund the unused portion.
- If you were charged in error, we refund the error in full as soon as we find it.
Vendors
The same cooling-off right and the same cancellation terms apply to a listing. A listing that we remove for a breach of the vendor terms is not refunded; a listing we remove for any other reason is refunded pro rata.
Chargebacks
Please contact us before raising a chargeback with your bank. We would rather resolve it directly, and it is almost always faster.
How to reach us
- Billing questions
- info@qaculture.co.za
- Cancellations
- info@qaculture.co.za
Version history
- 1.0 — 25 August 2026
- The first published version.