Spotlight & Credits — Commercial Terms

1. Who you are contracting with

These terms govern the purchase of Nostoi credits and Spotlight placements. Your supplier and merchant of record is Custom Artificial Intelligence Solutions (Pty) Ltd, registration 2016/377651/07, trading as Custom AI Solutions and as Nostoi.ai (“Nostoi”, “we”). Paystack is our payment processor; your contract for the products is with us, not Paystack.

Custom Artificial Intelligence Solutions (Pty) Ltd is not a registered VAT vendor. The price shown at checkout is the total you pay. No VAT is charged, and payment confirmations are proof of payment only — they are not tax invoices and cannot support an input-VAT claim. If we register for VAT in future, our pricing and documents will say so before you buy.

2. What a Spotlight is — and the Advisory-Integrity Warranty

A Spotlight places your listing in a clearly-labelled Sponsored panel shown to buyers whose search your listing matches. Two products exist: Area Spotlight (the sponsored panel shown with matching searches in the listing's area) and Premium Spotlight (one of at most two Premium places, always shown above any Area Spotlights).

ADVISORY-INTEGRITY WARRANTY (a material term of this agreement): no payment to Nostoi ever influences Nostoi's advisory content, matching, ranking, fit language, warnings, evidence displays, map presentation, or anything else a buyer sees outside the labelled Sponsored panel, other than the room that panel takes above Nostoi's own listings and the moment it takes to load. These protected surfaces are enforced in our software. No employee, agent or representative of Nostoi is authorised to promise advisory favour; please report any such statement to hello@nostoi.ai, and it does not amend this agreement. If we breach this warranty in respect of your placement, you may elect a full re-credit or a refund of that placement — without limiting any other right the law gives you that cannot be excluded.

A Spotlight buys placement, not performance. We make no promise of views, clicks, enquiries or a sale.

Identical terms, identical published prices and identical pack discounts apply to every agency and agent. A Spotlight never overrides listing eligibility rules, including publication state and PPRA/FFC requirements.

3. Credits

Nostoi credits are non-expiring prepaid credits for paid Spotlight products only. For Spotlight redemption, 1 credit has a R10 list redemption value; larger credit packs may be sold at an upfront volume discount. Nostoi Pro members pay the listed credit price of each Spotlight; other agents pay 10% more, rounded up to the next credit.

Credits never expire. Purchases, returns and adjustments are all in whole credits.

Credits are a prepayment for Nostoi promotional services only. They are not legal tender, an investment product, or a transferable financial instrument, and they are not transferable outside your agency relationship or redeemable for cash except where the law requires it. Nothing in these terms alters any statutory protection that applies to prepaid consideration, including under section 63 of the Consumer Protection Act where it applies to you.

An agency principal may allocate pool credits to the agency's agents and may revoke UNSPENT allocated credits at any time. Spent credits are never revoked. An agent may also buy their own credits; either balance can fund a Spotlight.

4. Payments, refunds, cancellations and disputes

Payments are processed by Paystack. A payment grants its credits exactly once; duplicate payment notifications have no further effect.

Refunds: you may request a refund of unspent PAID credits to the original payment method. We submit approved refunds to Paystack within 10 business days of a complete, verified request. Statutory refund periods, where they apply, prevail over this clause. Delays by banks or card networks after submission are outside our control.

Cooling-off: two different laws can give you a cancellation right, depending on who you are and how the purchase came about. Under section 44 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, a natural person buying online may cancel certain service transactions within 7 days — unless, with their consent, the service has already begun. Where a purchase legally results from direct marketing by us and you are protected by section 16 of the Consumer Protection Act (which can depend on your agency's size), you may cancel within 5 business days and we will refund within 15 business days without penalty. These rights apply to the extent the law says they do; nothing in these terms excludes or limits any right that cannot be excluded.

Immediate commencement: by purchasing a Spotlight you expressly request that the service begins immediately. Where the law makes a cooling-off right depend on the service not having begun, your express request is the consent that lets it begin at once — and this affects that right only to the extent the law allows.

Reversed payments: if a payment is charged back or reversed, the credits it bought are removed from the balance. If they were already spent, the balance may go negative and further purchases are blocked until it is settled. Campaigns funded by a reversed payment may be cancelled. We never forfeit funds on suspicion alone; money moves only under this clause or a statutory obligation.

5. Campaigns

A campaign starts immediately on purchase and ends automatically when its period lapses.

If you stop a campaign early, the unused whole days come back to the paying credit balance as credits, rounded DOWN to the next multiple of 10 credits. (When a listing is unpublished, withdrawn or sold, the return is rounded UP, as the sentence below says.)

Nostoi may offer a fifteen-minute window on a Spotlight; where it does, your dashboard says so when you buy. If you stop such a Spotlight within 15 minutes of its start, every credit you spent on it returns to the paying credit balance — the first day is not charged.

Upgrading an Area Spotlight to a Premium Spotlight within the Area Spotlight's first 15 minutes returns every credit spent on it the same way; the Premium Spotlight is then charged at its full listed price.

The fifteen-minute return applies at most twice per listing in any 24 hours. A third stop on the same listing within 24 hours, like any stop after the first 15 minutes, is an ordinary early stop: the unused whole days come back, rounded down as above.

If the promoted listing is unpublished, withdrawn or sold during the campaign, the Spotlight stops showing (placement follows the same publication rules as everything buyers see) and the unspent portion — calculated on whole remaining days and rounded UP to the next multiple of 10 credits — is returned to the paying credit balance automatically. Returns are always in credits, never cash, except where the law requires a monetary refund.

6. Acceptance and what we record

You accept these terms in your portal before your first purchase, and again whenever the terms version changes.

When you accept, we record: the terms version, your user account, your role, the agency or entity you act for, the date and time, the acceptance source, your IP address and a basic browser identifier, and — for purchases — the payment or campaign reference. We record this for contract, security, fraud-prevention, audit and dispute purposes only; it is disclosed in our Privacy Policy, and it is never used to influence advisory content or paid-placement outputs.

7. Suspension and content removal

We may suspend purchasing — for the platform or for an account — where reasonably necessary to protect the platform, for example on suspicion of fraud. A purchasing suspension does not touch your balance or running campaigns; those are affected only if fraud is confirmed or clause 4 applies.

Content removal: we may hide or remove a listing, or any content in it, where we reasonably consider this necessary for legal compliance or because the content is clearly unsafe, unlawful, or seriously misleading. Where practical we notify the listing agent with the reason, and every use of this power is internally logged and auditable. If a hidden listing was under a paid Spotlight, the unspent portion returns as credits under clause 5. This power exists to protect buyers and the platform — it is never used for commercial advantage or to favour any agency.

8. General

South African law governs these terms. If any clause is unenforceable, the rest stand. Changes to these terms apply to future purchases only and require your re-acceptance; they never rewrite a purchase already made.

9. Nostoi Pro Membership — standing, standards, and the full ladder

Nostoi Pro Membership is a monthly subscription that buys STANDING: eligibility to receive seller introductions, a visible Nostoi Pro badge and the listed Spotlight price (other agents pay 10% more). It never buys advisory favour, ranking, or a promise of any number of introductions, and no introduction is an endorsement. Nostoi earns no fee from any sale.

Seller introductions are on by default for every Nostoi Pro member; you can pause them from your Nostoi Agent Dashboard at any time.

Nostoi's automated matching and advisory scoring remain strictly independent; paid Spotlights guarantee placement in the clearly-demarcated Sponsored panel only, and never influence organic recommendations, warnings, or fit language.

Responding to introductions. When a seller is introduced to you, you must contact them promptly and then record the outcome in your Nostoi Agent Dashboard: either that you made contact, or that you were unable to contact the seller despite multiple attempts (an honest 'unable to contact' is never held against you). If you record nothing by the stated deadline — which only starts once we can show the introduction actually reached you — the introduction is reassigned and a strike is recorded. Strikes lapse automatically 90 days after they are issued. Three active strikes pause introductions automatically; the pause lifts automatically as strikes lapse or are set aside on appeal. Every strike can be appealed from your dashboard, once, and no enforcement escalates while your appeal is open. Sellers are asked afterwards whether contact happened; a seller's silence is never counted against you.

Listing quality standard. Membership requires keeping the average quality score of your current listings at or above the published threshold. Scoring is deterministic and fully explained: every deduction names the exact field and the exact fix in your dashboard; new listings are excluded from your average for their first 7 days; anything your feed cannot yet supply is excluded from scoring entirely — you are never marked down for data your feed cannot carry, and if we change how scoring works you get a migration grace period so a rubric change alone can never put you in breach.

The cure window. If your average falls below the threshold you get a written coaching notice and a 14-calendar-day window to bring it back up. Nothing changes during the window, and the moment your average recovers, the matter closes automatically. If the window passes without recovery, your membership PAUSES: introductions and the badge stop, and your subscription billing stops at the same time, so no further month is charged while the pause lasts. The current paid month is not refunded when a pause starts. If a pause is later shown to have been caused by our scoring or data error, we correct the record, lift the pause, and credit the membership days lost to that error. Your ordinary listings remain live. Recovery lifts the pause, and restarts billing, automatically. To keep the system honest, repeated dipping in and out is limited: only after 60 consecutive compliant days does a fresh breach earn a fresh 14-day window.

Every pause under these terms — strikes or quality — lifts automatically when its cause is resolved. There is no discretionary hold and no manual review step. Separately from appeals, you can report a factual error in a quality score or deduction from your dashboard at any time; a deduction shown to be wrong is corrected, and a corrected score takes effect immediately.

Termination is reserved. Membership is terminated (not paused) only for: fraud or dishonesty toward Nostoi or a seller (including a false contact confirmation shown to be untrue and unexplained), loss of the legal standing to practise (PPRA/FFC), serious data-protection or conduct-code breaches, non-payment, or your agency leaving the platform. Termination stops your subscription immediately; no part-month is refunded. Conduct records survive cancellation or termination.

You may cancel at any time from your dashboard: the debit order stops immediately, your standing runs to the end of the paid period, and nothing further is charged.