Terms of service

01 · Acceptance

Accepting these terms

By accessing or using Pleks you agree to be bound by these Terms of Service and our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, you may not use the platform. These terms constitute a legally binding agreement between you and Pleks (Pty) Ltd, a company registered in the Republic of South Africa, concluded by data message under section 22 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 ECT Act · S22.

If you are accepting these terms on behalf of an organisation, you confirm that you have authority to bind that organisation to these terms. Where the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 CPA applies, these terms are subject to and interpreted in light of that Act.

Key definitions used in these terms:

• Platform — the Pleks software-as-a-service application, APIs, and associated tooling.
• Subscriber / Agency — includes estate agencies, property practitioners, landlords, and any juristic or natural person subscribing to Pleks. Where an individual landlord subscribes, references to “Agency” apply to that individual.
• Tenant / Applicant — a natural person who applies for or occupies a rental property managed through the platform.
• Personal Information — as defined in POPIA s1 — information relating to an identifiable, living, natural person and, where applicable, an identifiable, existing juristic person.
• Responsible Party — the party that determines the purpose and means of processing personal information; for Part B agency-management data, this is the Agency.
• Operator — a party that processes personal information on behalf of a Responsible Party; Pleks is the Operator for Part B data.

02 · Service description

What Pleks is

Pleks is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) property management platform designed for the South African market. It provides tools for managing rental properties, processing tenant applications, collecting rent, handling maintenance requests, conducting inspections, and generating compliance documentation.

Pleks is not a property management company and does not act as a landlord, agent or intermediary in any property transaction. All decisions about tenants, leases, and property management remain entirely with you. Pleks (Pty) Ltd is a technology provider. Pleks does not perform any activity that would require it to be registered as a Property Practitioner under the Property Practitioners Act 22 of 2019 PPA, and does not hold, and is not required to hold, a Fidelity Fund Certificate.

Trust funds. Pleks does not hold client funds. Trust money for rental management is held in the Agency’s own Section 54 trust account at the Agency’s own bank. Pleks is not a trustee and does not initiate or control payments on behalf of any party.

03 · Subscription & payment

Subscription & payment

Access to Pleks requires a paid subscription. Subscription fees are billed on a recurring basis through our payment processor. By subscribing, you authorise the payment processor to charge your chosen payment method at the applicable billing interval. The current payment processor is listed in the operators directory at pleks.co.za/popia-register.

• Prices are quoted in South African Rand (ZAR) and are inclusive of VAT where applicable.
• We reserve the right to change pricing with 30 days’ written notice to your registered email address.
• Applicant credit check fees are paid directly by the applicant at the time of their application — not by your agency subscription.
• Failed payments may result in temporary suspension of your account until the balance is settled.
• Annual subscriptions are not currently offered. Should annual billing be introduced, natural-person subscribers (not juristic entities) will be notified by email between 40 and 80 business days before each renewal date, as required by section 14 of the Consumer Protection Act CPA · S14. Agency and company subscribers are not subject to this notice obligation.

04 · Cancellation

Cancelling your subscription

You may cancel your subscription at any time from within your account settings. Upon cancellation, your subscription will remain active until the end of the current billing period. No pro-rated refunds are issued for partial billing periods except where required under applicable law.

If you are a natural person within the meaning of the CPA and on a fixed-term agreement, you may also cancel the agreement at any time by giving at least 20 business days’ written notice to legal@pleks.co.za. Pleks may impose a reasonable cancellation penalty calculated in accordance with regulation 5 of the CPA Regulations (CPA · S14(2)(b)). Agency and juristic-entity subscribers on fixed-term agreements are subject to any notice and penalty terms agreed at sign-up.

Which subscribers this applies to. Pleks currently offers month-to-month subscriptions only, and a month-to-month subscription is not a fixed-term agreement. The fixed-term provisions in this section — and the renewal notice under CPA · S14 in §03 — therefore apply only where a fixed-term agreement has been separately concluded. On a month-to-month subscription you may cancel at any time from your account settings, with access continuing until the end of the period you have paid for, and no cancellation penalty applies.

Cancellation is confirmed by passkey or authenticator code challenge. Where neither is enrolled, an email confirmation link with 24-hour validity is sent instead. An unconfirmed cancellation request expires automatically and the subscription continues uninterrupted. The 12-month read-only access period begins only upon confirmed cancellation.

After cancellation, you will retain read-only access to your data for 12 months. During this period you can use the bulk-export feature to download all leases, inspection reports, financial records, and tenant documents in a single archive. After the 12-month grace period, operational data is permanently deleted unless continued retention is required by law, active legal hold, dispute preservation obligations, or another lawful basis. Pleks is not responsible for data loss that results from failure to export within the grace period.

Statutory retention after cancellation. Certain data categories are subject to mandatory retention obligations that continue after the 12-month grace period regardless of cancellation. These include trust records (Property Practitioners Act s54 + Regulation 33 — 5 years from the end of the financial year), tax records (Tax Administration Act s29 — 5 years), FICA records (FICA s23 — 5 years), audit logs (7 years), and consent records (5 years from the consent event). During the extended retention period, that data is held in a restricted-access archive, used only for the legal obligation that requires its retention, and deleted at the end of the applicable window. The full retention schedule is published in the POPIA processing register.

05 · Prohibited uses

What you may not do

You agree not to use Pleks for any purpose that is unlawful or prohibited by these terms. Without limitation, you may not:

• Use the platform to discriminate against prospective tenants on any grounds prohibited by South African law, including the Rental Housing Act RHA.
• Attempt to reverse-engineer, decompile, or extract the source code of the platform.
• Share your account credentials with third parties or allow unauthorised access to your account.
• Use the platform to store or transmit malicious code, spam, or unlawful content.
• Resell, sublicense, or redistribute access to the platform without our prior written consent.
• Use automated tools to scrape, crawl, or extract data from the platform at scale.

You warrant that any personal information submitted to or processed through Pleks has been collected lawfully and is processed in compliance with applicable data protection legislation, including the Protection of Personal Information Act POPIA. You further warrant that you will not use the platform to engage in any discriminatory practice prohibited under the Rental Housing Act RHA, including unlawful discrimination against prospective tenants on any protected ground.

Your indemnity to Pleks. You indemnify Pleks (Pty) Ltd against any claim, penalty, legal cost, or loss arising from unlawful collection, processing, or sharing of personal information by you as Responsible Party, or from any discriminatory practice, carried out through your use of the platform.

Pleks’s indemnity to you. Pleks indemnifies you against direct losses arising from Pleks’s proven breach of its obligations as Operator under POPIA s20–s21 and §09 of these terms, subject to the limitation of liability in §06 (total liability capped at 12 months of fees paid), except that the cap does not apply to losses arising from Pleks’s gross negligence or wilful breach.

Breach of these conditions may result in immediate suspension or termination of your account without refund, and may expose you to civil or criminal liability.

06 · Limitation of liability

Limitation of liability

To the maximum extent permitted by South African law, Pleks (Pty) Ltd shall not be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages arising out of or related to your use of the platform — including loss of data, loss of revenue, or loss of goodwill.

Our total liability for any claim arising from these terms or your use of Pleks shall not exceed the total amount you paid to us in the 12 months preceding the claim. The platform is provided “as is” and we make no warranties, express or implied, regarding its availability, accuracy or fitness for a particular purpose.

Nothing in this clause limits liability for fraud, gross negligence, or any liability that cannot be excluded under applicable law including the CPA.

Consumer subscribers (CPA). If you are a consumer within the meaning of the CPA, the limitations in this section apply only to the extent permitted by the CPA, and your statutory rights under sections 55, 56, and 61 of the CPA are not limited or excluded by anything in this clause.

Pleks relies on third-party infrastructure providers — see the operators directory in the POPIA processing register for the current list. Pleks is not liable for losses caused solely by failure, outage, or breach of those third-party service providers, except to the extent that such loss arises from Pleks’s failure to exercise reasonable care in selecting, appointing, or managing those providers. See §08 for our service availability terms.

07 · Governing law

Governing law

These terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Republic of South Africa. Without limiting any consumer’s rights under the CPA to approach the National Consumer Tribunal, an accredited consumer ombud, the Magistrate’s Court or the Small Claims Court, the parties consent to the jurisdiction of the Western Cape Division of the High Court of South Africa for any dispute that is heard in the High Court (CPA · S69 · S115).

We prefer to resolve disputes amicably before going to court. If you have a complaint, please contact us first — we will respond within 10 business days.

Supplier information. The following details are provided in accordance with section 43(1) of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 ECT Act · S43, which requires a supplier offering goods or services electronically to identify itself.

08 · Service availability

Service availability

We do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free operation of the platform. Pleks may be temporarily unavailable due to scheduled maintenance, infrastructure updates, or circumstances beyond our control. We will endeavour to carry out scheduled maintenance during off-peak hours and to provide reasonable notice where possible.

We target 99% monthly uptime for the authenticated dashboard. This target does not constitute a guaranteed Service Level Agreement (SLA) and does not create an entitlement to compensation or credit unless a separate SLA has been agreed in writing. Real-time platform status, including any active incidents and historical uptime, is published at status.pleks.co.za. You can check this page at any time to confirm whether a service disruption has been reported.

Planned or unplanned downtime does not entitle you to a refund of subscription fees unless the disruption causes Pleks to fall materially below any service level expressly agreed in writing.

09 · Data processing — Pleks as Operator

Data processing obligations

This section constitutes the written data-processing terms required by sections 20 and 21 of the Protection of Personal Information Act POPIA · S20 POPIA · S21. It governs Pleks’s obligations as Operator when processing personal information on behalf of the Agency as Responsible Party (“Part B” processing as described in the POPIA processing register). This section supplements, and does not replace, the privacy obligations set out in our Privacy Policy and the processing register.

09.1 — Instructions-only processing

Pleks will process personal information only on documented instructions from the Agency. The purpose entries in the POPIA processing register constitute the Agency’s standing instructions for all standard platform operations. Pleks will not process Part B personal information for any purpose outside the register without the Agency’s prior written consent, except where required by law — in which case Pleks will notify the Agency before processing unless prohibited from doing so.

09.2 — Security safeguards

Pleks will implement and maintain appropriate technical and organisational security measures consistent with POPIA · S19 to protect personal information against accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure, or access. These measures include AES-256 encryption at rest, TLS in transit, column-level encryption for sensitive fields, multi-factor authentication, and role-based access controls. Pleks will ensure that personnel with access to Part B data are bound by confidentiality obligations.

09.3 — Sub-processors

By subscribing, the Agency generally authorises Pleks to engage sub-processors listed in the operators directory of the POPIA processing register. Before engaging a new sub-processor or materially changing an existing sub-processor’s scope, Pleks will notify the Agency by email to the registered address at least 30 days in advance. The Agency may object in writing within that period; if no resolution is reached, the Agency may terminate the affected services without penalty. All sub-processors are bound by data-protection obligations at least as protective as those in this section.

09.4 — Breach notification

Pleks will notify the affected Agency immediately once Pleks has reasonable grounds to believe that personal information processed for that Agency has been accessed or acquired by an unauthorised person. For this clause, Pleks becomes aware when it has such reasonable grounds. The notification will include, to the extent known at the time: (a) the nature of the breach and categories of personal information affected; (b) an estimate of the number of data subjects likely to be affected; (c) the likely consequences of the breach; and (d) the measures Pleks has taken or proposes to take to address the breach. The Agency must then independently assess whether its own POPIA · S22 obligations to notify the Information Regulator and affected data subjects are triggered; POPIA s22 requires the Agency, as Responsible Party, to make those notifications as soon as reasonably possible. To report or escalate a suspected breach, contact the Information Officer at legal@pleks.co.za.

09.5 — Audit rights

Agencies as Responsible Parties have the right to verify Pleks’s compliance with these data-processing obligations. Pleks supports this right through: (a) this publicly available processing register and Terms of Service; (b) provision of a completed security questionnaire or equivalent on written request (at no cost, once per 12 months); and (c) cooperation with reasonable compliance audits on 30 days’ written notice. Audits under (c) are conducted at the Agency’s cost, are limited to once per 12 months absent a documented incident, and may be conducted via questionnaire and remote review unless the Agency demonstrates a specific need for on-site inspection. All audits must be conducted in a manner that does not unreasonably interfere with Pleks’s operations or compromise the security of other customers’ data.

09.6 — End-of-engagement data handling

Upon termination of the Agency’s subscription and expiry of the 12-month read-only grace period (§04), Pleks will delete or anonymise all Part B personal information not subject to a statutory retention obligation. Statutory retention categories are set out in §04 and the processing register. At the Agency’s written request, Pleks will provide a summary of what data categories are retained post-deletion and the applicable retention windows.

09.7 — Cooperation with data-subject requests

Pleks will promptly assist the Agency in fulfilling data-subject rights requests (access, correction, deletion, objection) to the extent technically practicable. Where a data subject submits a rights request directly to Pleks concerning Part B data, Pleks will route the request to the Agency within 5 business days for the Agency to respond as Responsible Party. Pleks will provide the Agency, within a timeframe that allows the Agency to meet its 30-calendar-day response obligation under POPIA s23 / PAIA s25, any information in Pleks’s control that is necessary to respond to the request.

09.8 — Statistical and research processing (service improvement)

Pleks may process Customer Data in pseudonymised form — with direct identifiers such as name, identity number, contact details and address removed — for service improvement, screening-model calibration, and aggregate benchmarking across the platform. This is further processing permitted under POPIA · S15(3)(e), which treats processing for historical, statistical or research purposes as compatible with the original purpose where the results are not published in an identifiable form, and the associated records may be retained beyond the operational period under POPIA · S14(2) subject to safeguards preventing their use for any other purpose.

What this does and does not permit. Results are published only in aggregate — never as, or attributable to, an individual data subject, an individual Agency, or an identifiable property. Pseudonymised records are not used to make or influence any decision about an individual outside the application they arose from, and are not disclosed to any other Agency. Pleks does not operate, and this clause does not authorise, a shared tenant blacklist or any cross-agency applicant register.

Erasure and this clause. A data-subject erasure request removes identity, not the statistical record: identifying fields are deleted or severed while the de-identified fact is retained under s14(2). Where the Agency instructs deletion of Customer Data, the same treatment applies. Retention of the operational record itself continues to be governed by §04 and the retention schedule published in the POPIA processing register.

10 · General provisions

General provisions

• Entire agreement. These terms — including the data-processing obligations in §09, which constitute the written Operator agreement required by POPIA s20–s21 — together with the Privacy Policy and the POPIA processing register (each incorporated by reference), constitute the entire agreement between the parties with respect to Pleks and supersede all prior agreements and understandings.
• Severability. If any provision of these terms is found to be unenforceable or invalid under applicable law, that provision will be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it enforceable, or severed if modification is not possible, and the remaining provisions will continue in full force.
• Assignment. You may not assign or transfer your rights or obligations under these terms without Pleks’s prior written consent. Pleks may assign these terms to a successor entity in connection with a merger, acquisition, or sale of all or substantially all of its assets, with notice to you.
• Force majeure. Neither party will be liable for failure or delay in performance caused by circumstances beyond reasonable control, including acts of God, government action, internet infrastructure failure, or third-party service outages, except where the failure was caused or materially contributed to by Pleks’s own act or omission. The affected party must give prompt notice and use reasonable efforts to resume performance.
• Notices. Legal notices to Pleks must be sent to legal@pleks.co.za. Notices from Pleks to you will be sent to your registered email address and are deemed delivered when sent.
• Amendments. Pleks may update these terms from time to time. Material changes will be communicated by email at least 30 days before they take effect. Material changes include any change to fee structure, data-processing terms, limitation of liability, governing law, or termination rights. Non-material changes (typographical corrections, link updates, structural clarifications) take effect on publication and do not trigger the 30-day window. Continued use of the platform after the effective date of a material change constitutes acceptance of the updated terms.
• Survival. The following sections survive termination of these terms and any cancellation of your subscription: §04 (statutory retention obligations), §05 (indemnities), §06 (limitation of liability), §09 (data processing obligations, until all Part B data has been deleted or the applicable statutory retention window has closed), and §10 (general provisions).