1. Who you are contracting with

This website and the services described on it are operated by VDM Digital (Pty) Ltd, a private company incorporated in the Republic of South Africa.

  • Registered name: VDM DIGITAL (PTY) LTD
  • Company registration number: 2026/179981/07
  • Registered and principal place of business: 13 Jigger Avenue, Somerset West, Western Cape, 7130, South Africa
  • Website: https://vdmdigital.io
  • Email: erik@vdmdigital.io
  • Telephone: Our telephone number is published in the current version of this document on our website, and is available on request by email.
  • Directors: Nico van der Merwe and Erik van der Merwe
  • VAT status: VDM Digital (Pty) Ltd is not a registered VAT vendor, so no VAT is charged and no VAT is shown on our invoices. If we register for VAT we will say so here and on every invoice from that date.

In these terms, "we", "us", "our" and "VDM Digital" mean VDM Digital (Pty) Ltd. "You" and "your" mean the person or organisation using this website or buying our services.

These disclosures are made in compliance with section 43 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 ("ECTA") and section 32 of the Companies Act 71 of 2008.

2. What these terms cover

These terms apply to three things:

  1. Your use of this website.
  2. Any quote, proposal, statement of work or order you accept from us.
  3. Any payment you make to us, whether once-off or recurring.

Where a signed proposal, statement of work or service agreement conflicts with these terms, that document wins for the engagement it covers. These terms fill every gap it leaves.

We may change these terms. The version that applies to your engagement is the version published on this page on the date you accepted the relevant quote or made the relevant payment. Every published version is retained and can be produced on request.

3. What we do

VDM Digital is a digital partner agency. Depending on what you engage us for, we may provide:

  • Custom website and web application design and development
  • E-commerce build, integration and maintenance
  • Business systems, internal tooling and systems integration
  • Workflow automation
  • Search visibility and technical SEO work
  • Security review and hardening
  • Ongoing management, hosting arrangements, support and retainers

Nothing on this website is an offer capable of acceptance. It is an invitation to do business. A binding agreement comes into existence only when we issue a written quote, proposal or invoice and you accept it in writing or by payment.

4. Quotes, pricing and currency

  • All prices are quoted in South African Rand (ZAR) unless the quote says otherwise.
  • VDM Digital (Pty) Ltd is not a registered VAT vendor, so no VAT is charged and no VAT is shown on our invoices. If we register for VAT we will say so here and on every invoice from that date.
  • Quotes are valid for 30 days from the date of issue unless stated otherwise on the quote.
  • The full price payable, including any fees, charges and taxes we know of at the time, is stated on the quote or invoice before you are asked to pay. If a third-party cost is unavoidable and cannot be fixed in advance (for example a domain registration, a third-party licence, or a payment processor cross-border fee), we identify it on the quote as a pass-through cost and charge it at cost.
  • Bank charges, currency conversion costs and card-network fees levied by your own bank are yours to carry.
  • We do not store your card details. Card payments are processed by a third-party payment processor — see clause 5.

5. Payment

5.1 How you can pay

  • Electronic funds transfer (EFT) to the bank account shown on the invoice.
  • Card and instant EFT, processed by Paystack, our South African payment processor, in ZAR.
  • International card payments may in future be processed by Stripe. This is not live yet. Until we say otherwise on this page, every payment to us is processed in ZAR by Paystack or made by EFT.

Your card details are entered on, and held by, the payment processor. They never reach our servers and we never see or store a full card number. We keep only the outcome of the transaction, the amount, the currency, the date and a reference. Our processors are PCI-DSS compliant and, as required by section 43(5) of ECTA, we use a payment system that is sufficiently secure with reference to accepted technological standards for the type of transaction concerned.

When you pay through a processor you also accept that processor's own terms and privacy policy. See our Privacy Policy for the list of processors and what they receive.

5.2 When payment is due

  • Project work is invoiced according to the milestone schedule in the accepted quote. Unless the quote says otherwise, a deposit is payable before work starts and the balance is payable on delivery, before the work goes live.
  • Retainers are invoiced monthly in advance. A retainer starts on the agreed go-live date, not on the date you agreed to it and not on the date you paid a deposit.
  • Once-off invoices are payable within 7 days of the invoice date unless the invoice states different terms.

5.3 Late payment

If an invoice is not paid by its due date we may, on reasonable written notice:

  • Charge interest on the overdue amount at the rate prescribed under the Prescribed Rate of Interest Act 55 of 1975, calculated daily from the due date until payment;
  • Suspend work, support and access to any service we manage for you, until the account is settled; and
  • Withhold delivery of, or the transfer of rights in, any work that has not been paid for (see clause 7).

We will always tell you before we suspend anything.

6. Your obligations

You agree to:

  • Give us accurate information, and the access, content, approvals and decisions we need, when we need them;
  • Hold the rights to any content, logo, image, font, data or copy you supply to us, and to indemnify us against any claim that it infringes someone else's rights;
  • Keep the credentials we issue you secure, and tell us immediately if you think they have been compromised;
  • Use anything we build or host for you in line with our Acceptable Use Policy; and
  • Meet your own legal obligations, including under POPIA, if we process personal information on your behalf.

If a project stalls because we are waiting on you, timelines move out accordingly and we may re-invoice a milestone that has been held open for more than 30 days.

7. Intellectual property

  • What you supply stays yours. Your content, trade marks, data and brand assets remain your property throughout.
  • What we make becomes yours on payment. On receipt of full payment for a deliverable, we assign to you the copyright in the bespoke work produced specifically for you under that deliverable — the design, the page templates, the bespoke code and the copy we wrote for you.
  • What we bring stays ours. Our pre-existing tools, libraries, internal frameworks, boilerplate, know-how and anything we build for general reuse remain ours. Where such material is embedded in your deliverable, you get a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to use it as part of that deliverable.
  • Third-party components — open-source libraries, fonts, stock imagery, plugins and hosted services — are licensed to you on their own terms, not assigned. We tell you which ones are involved.
  • Before payment, everything we produce remains ours and you have no licence to use it.
  • Credit and portfolio. Unless you ask us in writing not to, we may identify you as a client, describe the work at a high level, and show the public-facing result in our portfolio and marketing. We will never publish your confidential information, internal data or commercial figures.

8. Third-party services and hosting

Most engagements involve third parties — hosting providers, domain registrars, payment processors, email providers, analytics, content delivery networks and similar. We choose them with care and manage them for you, but:

  • Their availability, pricing and terms are theirs to set, not ours;
  • Where a service is billed in your name, that contract is between you and them; and
  • We are not liable for a third party outage, price change, data loss or discontinuation, beyond our obligation to act reasonably and promptly to mitigate it.

9. Warranties and what we do not promise

We warrant that we will perform our services with the reasonable care, skill and diligence of a competent provider in our field, and in a manner consistent with section 54 of the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 where that Act applies to you.

We do not warrant that:

  • Any website or system will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of every vulnerability;
  • Any specific commercial outcome will follow — including a search ranking, a traffic level, a conversion rate or a revenue figure. We do not make performance guarantees and you should not rely on any informal estimate as one; or
  • Third-party software will remain compatible, supported or available.

We will fix defects in our own work, reported within 30 days of delivery of the relevant deliverable, at no charge. After that, and for anything outside the agreed scope, our normal rates apply. This does not limit any right you have that cannot lawfully be limited.

10. Limitation of liability

Please read this clause carefully. It limits our liability to you. It is drawn to your attention as required by section 49 of the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008.

To the maximum extent the law allows:

  • We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, goodwill, business opportunity, anticipated saving or data, however caused;
  • Our total aggregate liability arising out of or in connection with an engagement is limited to the total amount you actually paid us under that engagement in the twelve months before the event giving rise to the claim; and
  • Each party must take reasonable steps to mitigate its own loss.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, for gross negligence, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded — including your rights under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 and ECTA, which are not affected by anything in this clause.

11. Confidentiality

Each of us will keep the other confidential information confidential, use it only for the engagement, and protect it with at least the care we use for our own. This does not apply to information that is public through no fault of ours, that we already had, that we develop independently, or that we are legally required to disclose. This obligation survives the end of the engagement by three years.

12. Cancellation and refunds

Cancellation rights, the ECTA seven-day cooling-off right and its exclusions, notice periods for retainers, and how refunds are calculated and paid are set out in full in our Refund and Cancellation Policy, which forms part of these terms.

13. Termination

Either of us may terminate an engagement:

  • For convenience, on the notice period stated in the accepted quote or, for a retainer, on 30 days written notice;
  • Immediately, if the other commits a material breach and fails to remedy it within 14 days of written notice; or
  • Immediately, if the other is placed in liquidation, business rescue or sequestration, or commits an act of insolvency.

On termination you must pay for all work performed and all costs committed up to the termination date. Clauses 7, 10, 11, 14 and 15 survive termination.

14. Complaints and dispute resolution

Tell us first. Email erik@vdmdigital.io with the details and we will acknowledge within 2 business days and give you a substantive response within 10 business days.

If we cannot resolve it between us, either of us may refer the dispute to mediation by a mediator agreed between us, or failing agreement appointed by the Chairperson of the Cape Bar Council. Mediation is not a precondition to either of us seeking urgent interim relief from a court.

If the Consumer Protection Act applies to you, you may also refer a complaint to the National Consumer Commission or to an accredited consumer ombud, and nothing in these terms takes that right away. If your complaint is about how we handled your personal information, you may complain to the Information Regulator (South Africa) — see our Privacy Policy.

15. General

  • Governing law. These terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of South Africa.
  • Jurisdiction. We each consent to the jurisdiction of the Western Cape Division of the High Court of South Africa, without prejudice to your right to approach a Magistrate Court or a consumer forum where the law gives you that right.
  • Whole agreement. These terms, together with the accepted quote or proposal and the policies they refer to, are the whole agreement between us on their subject matter.
  • Severability. If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.
  • No waiver. If we do not enforce a right immediately, we do not lose it.
  • Cession. You may not cede or assign your rights under an engagement without our written consent, which we will not unreasonably withhold.
  • Notices. Written notice must be sent to erik@vdmdigital.io or delivered to our address above, and is deemed received on the next business day for email.
  • Electronic communication. You consent to us communicating with you electronically, and agree that electronic communications and records satisfy any legal requirement that a communication be in writing, as contemplated in ECTA.

16. Contact

VDM Digital (Pty) Ltd (Reg. No. 2026/179981/07)

13 Jigger Avenue, Somerset West, Western Cape, 7130, South Africa

Email: erik@vdmdigital.io

Telephone: Our telephone number is published in the current version of this document on our website, and is available on request by email.

Last updated: 10 September 2026.