Platform terms of use

1. Who we are

ToolBox Group (Pty) Ltd runs the ToolBox and ToolBox Pro apps and the website at toolbox.africa. In these terms, "ToolBox", "we", "us" and "our" mean ToolBox Group (Pty) Ltd.

Registered name

ToolBox Group (Pty) Ltd

Legal status

Private company, incorporated in South Africa under the Companies Act 71 of 2008 and registered with the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission

Registration number

2026/739048/07

Physical address

9 Arend Street, Bergsig, Great Brak River, Western Cape, 6525

Postal address

9 Arend Street, Bergsig, Great Brak River, Western Cape, 6525

Directors

Jacques Barnard, Managing Director

Telephone

TO BE CONFIRMED — telephone number

Email

help@toolbox.africa

Website

toolbox.africa

VAT number

Not VAT registered

We publish these details because section 43 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act 25 of 2002 requires anyone offering services electronically in South Africa to say plainly who they are and where they can be found. If you ever cannot reach us at the addresses above, that is a fault on our side and we want to hear about it.

2. What ToolBox is, and what it is not

ToolBox is an introduction service. We help you describe a job, we put that job in front of tradespeople who work that trade in your area and whose phone, identity and address we have verified, and we give both sides the tools to quote, talk, agree a time, invoice and review each other.

ToolBox is:

• A place to find a verified tradesperson.
• A record of what was agreed, quoted, scheduled and paid.
• A standard that tradespeople sign up to, and that we enforce.
• A route to complain, and to claim under the ToolBox Guarantee.

ToolBox is not:

• A builder, plumber, electrician or any other trade. We do not carry out work and we never will.
• The employer, agent, partner or joint venturer of any tradesperson on the platform.
• A party to the agreement for the work.
• An insurer, a bank, a credit provider or a financial services provider.
• A mediator or an arbitrator. We investigate, we decide who stays on the platform, and we may pay under the Guarantee, but we do not sit in judgment between you and the other person.

3. How to read these terms

These Platform terms apply to everybody, whichever app you use. Sitting under them are documents for particular situations. Where a specific document says something different from these terms, the specific document wins for that subject.

• Words and their meanings defines every term used across these documents.
• Terms for homeowners applies if you post a job or hire someone.
• Terms for tradespeople applies if you are on ToolBox to be found and hired.
• The ToolBox Standard is the code every tradesperson commits to.
• Acceptable use and Fair use apply to everybody.
• Reporting, blocking and staying safe is what to do about a person; Takedown notices is what to do about a piece of content.
• Privacy policy explains what we do with your personal information, and Who processes your information names everyone who handles it for us.

Nothing in any of these documents takes away a right you have under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008, the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013, or any other South African law. Where a clause here would have that effect, that clause does not apply to you, and the rest still stands.

4. Your account

You may open an account if you are 18 or older and legally able to enter into a contract. If you open an account for a business, you confirm that you are allowed to bind that business.

• Give us information that is true, complete and current, and update it when it changes.
• One person, one account. Do not open a second account to get around a suspension or a removal.
• Your account is yours. Do not share it, sell it or let someone else trade under it.
• We sign you in with a one-time code sent to your email or your mobile number. Keep control of that inbox and that number. Anything done with a valid code is treated as done by you.
• Keep the device you sign in from secure.
• Tell us immediately at help@toolbox.africa if you think someone else has reached your account, or is pretending to be you.

We may ask you for more proof of who you are where we reasonably need it to protect you, other users or ourselves against fraud, or to meet a legal duty. We may refuse to open an account, or close one, if the information you give us is false, if you have been removed before, or if we are required to by law.

5. What we check, and what a check means

No homeowner's job is sent to a tradesperson, and Browse does not show them, until we have verified their phone number, their identity and their address. Their other checks follow: a criminal record check, a trade registration where the trade requires one, and their insurance where they hold it. Each check passed earns a badge. The required checks for a trade are phone, identity, address, a criminal record check, and the trade's registrations where it has any (for solar, the PV GreenCard counts as one). Among tradespeople equally near a job, those who have passed the first four and at least one of their trade's registrations, where it has any, are offered the work and shown in Browse first; after them, the more of the required checks someone has passed, the sooner. Insurance, memberships and qualifications earn badges but do not change that order. We keep checking afterwards, and a registration or policy that runs out is marked expired on their profile. What each badge means, and what evidence sits behind it, is set out on the Trust page in the app.

Public liability insurance deserves a specific warning. We ask for the certificate and we record the expiry date. Cover is optional, and we cannot know the moment a policy is cancelled before that date. If insurance matters for your job, and for anything structural, electrical or involving water it should, ask the tradesperson to show you the current certificate before work starts. Once the expiry date passes without a renewal, the cover badge on their profile is marked expired until they send one.

We rely in part on documents and registration numbers given to us by tradespeople and confirmed against the issuing body where the issuing body allows it. If someone deceives us, we act under the Warnings, suspension and removal policy as soon as we know.

6. The agreement for the work

When a homeowner accepts a quote, a contract comes into existence between that homeowner and that tradesperson on the terms they agreed. That contract covers the price, the scope, the timing, the materials, the guarantees on the work, and everything else about the job.

We are not a party to it. We do not set the price, we do not decide the scope, and we cannot compel either side to perform. What we can do, and will do, is investigate, apply the Warnings, suspension and removal policy, and consider a claim under the ToolBox Guarantee.

A tradesperson is free to decline any job, for any lawful reason. A homeowner is free to decline any quote. Neither of you owes the other an explanation.

7. How we rank and match

When a homeowner searches Browse, or when we put a job in front of tradespeople, the order is decided by software. We think you are entitled to know how, so here it is.

Nobody is asked or shown unless they work the trade the job needs and have passed the checks every lead requires: their phone number, their identity and their address. A job then goes to those who can work in the window the homeowner asked for, and to others only when none of them can; Browse leaves out anyone away for the whole of the coming week. Among those, in the order it counts:

• Whether they cover the job's area, and how close they work to it.
• How far through the required checks for that trade they are (section 5): those who have passed them all first, then the more passed, the sooner.
• For a job, whether they take work around the clock when it is an emergency, then how many days of the window they can work.
• In Browse, tradespeople level on all of the above appear in an order that changes each day, so that nobody is always first.

Reviews, how quickly someone replies and how complete their profile is are shown to you so that you can weigh them yourself. They do not change the order.

Ranking is assisted by software, but a decision that materially affects someone, such as refusing verification or removing an account, is always made by a person. That is both our policy and what section 71 of POPIA requires.

8. What we charge

• Homeowners pay ToolBox nothing. Posting a job, receiving quotes, messaging and hiring are free. You pay the tradesperson for the work in the app, through Paystack, and the money goes straight to them, never through us.
• We take no commission. We do not take a cut of any job, ever. A tradesperson's price to you is not inflated by a ToolBox fee. The only fee that can appear on a tradesperson's invoice is Paystack's own processing fee, which they may pass on, and it is always shown as its own line.
• Tradespeople pay one monthly subscription, with every feature in it and no commission on their work. Those terms are in ToolBox Pro subscription terms.

If we ever introduce a charge to homeowners, we will tell you before it applies to you, and you will be able to decide before you are charged.

9. Content you put on ToolBox

"Content" means anything you upload or write: job descriptions, photographs, voice notes, messages, quotes, invoices, reviews, replies to reviews, and profile material.

You keep ownership of your Content. You give us a licence to host it, store it, display it to the people it is meant for, and use it to run and improve the platform. For Content that is meant to be public, such as a review or a portfolio project, that licence lets us show it publicly and in material that promotes ToolBox. The licence lasts as long as we need it for the purpose it was given for, and it survives your account closing only to the extent we explain in the Privacy policy.

You promise that your Content is yours to share, that it is accurate, and that it does not break the law or the Acceptable use policy. Do not upload a photograph of someone else's home, work or face without their agreement.

We may remove Content that breaches those rules, and we may correct obvious spelling and punctuation without changing meaning. We do not check everything before it appears, and we are not obliged to. Where someone tells us your Content infringes their rights, we may pass on what we reasonably must to deal with the claim.

If you want us to stop using a piece of your Content, ask at help@toolbox.africa and we will, unless we are required to keep it as a record of a job or a complaint.

10. Our intellectual property

The ToolBox name, the mark, the apps, the design, the text, the graphics and the software are ours or our licensors'. Using ToolBox gives you a personal, revocable, non-transferable licence to use it as intended, and nothing more.

You may not copy the apps except as ordinary use requires, sub-licence or resell any part of them, reverse-engineer them, scrape them, or use our name or mark in a way that suggests we endorse you when we do not. Tradespeople may say they are on ToolBox and use the badge we give them, on the terms in Terms for tradespeople.

11. Messages, calls and phone numbers

Messages between homeowners and tradespeople run through ToolBox so that there is a record if something goes wrong. We may read message content when we are investigating a complaint, a safety report or suspected fraud, and not otherwise. This is explained in the Privacy policy.

A homeowner's mobile number is not shown to a tradesperson until the homeowner hires them. Please keep the conversation on ToolBox until then. Phone numbers, email addresses, links and bank details written in a message or a job before the hire are hidden from the other side. If you take it off the platform early, we lose the record, and a later complaint or Guarantee claim becomes much harder to assess.

You can report any message, and you can block any account, from the conversation itself. A blocked account cannot message you, quote on your jobs or find you in search, and is not told. Reporting, blocking and staying safe sets out both, and what we do the same day when a report is about safety.

12. Where software helps us

We use automated tools, including machine learning, in a few specific places: turning a voice note into text, suggesting which trade a described job needs, ordering search results, spotting fake reviews and spam, and flagging photographs that should not be published.

• These tools assist people. They do not replace them where a decision matters.
• Automated output can be wrong. Treat a suggested trade or a summarised message as a helpful guess, not as advice.
• Nothing produced by these tools is professional, legal, electrical, structural or safety advice.
• If you see output that is wrong or harmful, report it to help@toolbox.africa and we will look at it.

We do not use your messages or your photographs to train third-party models.

13. The app itself

We work hard to keep ToolBox available, but we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted or error-free. We may change features, add them or withdraw them. If we withdraw something you rely on, we will give you reasonable notice where we can.

You need a compatible device and an internet connection. Data costs are yours, and if you are not the person who pays the bill for the device, please get their permission first. We support the current and previous major version of each mobile operating system, and we recommend you install updates when they appear.

14. Links to other people's sites

ToolBox sometimes links out, for example to a regulator, a registration body or a tradesperson's own website. We do not control those sites, we do not endorse them, and what happens on them is between you and them, under their terms and their privacy notices.

15. Suspending or ending access

You may close your account at any time from Settings. Closing it does not cancel a job you have already agreed, and it does not erase a review you have already left. Download anything you want to keep first, including quotes and invoices.

We may suspend or end your access under the Warnings, suspension and removal policy. That policy sets out the grounds, the process, the notice you get and your right to appeal. We apply it to homeowners and tradespeople alike.

We may also close an account that has never been verified, or that has been dormant for more than two years, after giving you notice by email first.

16. What we are responsible for, and what we are not

We are responsible for: running the platform with reasonable care and skill, doing the verification checks we say we do, handling your personal information lawfully, investigating complaints fairly, and honouring the ToolBox Guarantee on its terms.

We are not responsible for: the work a tradesperson does or fails to do; the price they charge; whether they arrive; loss, damage or injury caused by them on your property; the accuracy of what any user writes about themselves; or anything a user does off the platform.

17. What you are responsible for

18. Things outside anyone's control

Neither of us is liable for a delay or failure caused by something genuinely outside our control: load shedding and grid failure, flood, fire, storm, civil unrest, a national strike, a pandemic, or the failure of a network or payment provider we depend on. We will tell you what is happening and get back to normal as quickly as we can.

19. Changes to these terms

We may change these documents. When we do:

• We publish the new version here with a new date and version number, and we keep the previous versions available.
• For a change that materially affects your rights we give you at least 20 business days' notice by email or in the app before it takes effect.
• If you do not accept a material change, you may close your account before it takes effect. That is your remedy.
• A change never applies backwards to a job already agreed or a Guarantee claim already submitted.

20. General

• Severability. If a court finds any part of these terms unenforceable, that part is removed and the rest continues to apply.
• No waiver. If we do not enforce something immediately, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
• Assignment. You may not transfer your account or your rights under these terms. We may transfer ours if our business is sold, and your rights are not reduced by that. We will tell you if it happens.
• Whole agreement. These documents are the whole agreement between you and us about the platform, and they replace anything said before. This does not exclude liability for a fraudulent statement.
• Survival. The sections on content, intellectual property, liability, indemnity, privacy and governing law carry on applying after your account closes.
• Notices. We reach you by the email address or mobile number on your account, or by a message in the app. You reach us at the addresses in section 1.
• Feedback. If you send us an idea for improving ToolBox, we may use it without owing you anything. We will never publish your name against it without asking.

21. If something goes wrong

Please tell us. The Complaints and disputes document explains how to raise a problem, what we do with it, how long we take, and every other place you can go if you are not satisfied with us, including the Consumer Goods and Services Ombud, the National Consumer Commission and the courts.

22. Which law applies

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa. You may bring a claim in any court in South Africa that has jurisdiction, and we consent to the jurisdiction of the Magistrate's Court for any claim we bring, even where the amount would allow us to go to the High Court. We do that because it is cheaper and faster for you.

We will not ask you to arbitrate, we will not ask you to give up a class action, and we will not require you to bring a claim anywhere other than where you live or work.