Terms of Service

1. Who we are

Merik Network Co is a technology business based in Eldoret, Kenya. We build websites and digital systems for clients, and we run this platform, which includes an online learning academy, a library of business guides, a browser-based code playground, a members' community and a messaging system.

In this document, "we", "us" and "our" mean Merik Network Co. "You" means you, whether you are browsing without an account, registered for a free account, paying for a plan, or engaging us for client work. "The service" means this website and everything we operate on it.

2. Accepting these terms

You accept these terms when you do any one of the following:

• Create an account. The sign-up form asks you to confirm that you have read and accept this document and the Privacy Notice, and it will not submit until you do.
• Buy a plan, a guide, or any other paid item.
• Continue to use the service after we publish a change to these terms.

We record the date you accepted, and which version you accepted, against your account. If you do not accept these terms, do not create an account and do not buy anything. You are still welcome to read the public pages.

3. Who may use the service

You may use the service if all of the following are true:

• You are at least 18 years old, or you are at least 13 and have permission from a parent or guardian who accepts these terms on your behalf.
• You have not previously had an account terminated by us for a breach of these terms, unless we have agreed in writing that you may return.
• You are not barred from receiving services under any law that applies to you.

If we discover that an account belongs to someone under 13, we will close it and delete the personal data attached to it. If you believe a child has given us their details, write to support@merikagency.com and we will deal with it promptly.

4. Your account

4.1 Registration details

Give us accurate details and keep them current. We use your email address for receipts, security notices, password resets and anything else that materially affects your account. If your address bounces, you may miss something important, and that is not something we can fix on your behalf.

4.2 Keeping it secure

You are responsible for what happens under your account. Choose a password you have not used elsewhere, and do not share it. If you think someone else has access, change your password and tell us at once.

We hash every password and never store it in a form we can read, so we cannot tell you what your password is; we can only help you set a new one. Repeated failed sign-in attempts temporarily lock the account for fifteen minutes. That is a security measure, not a penalty, and it lifts on its own.

4.3 One person, one account

An account is for one person. Do not share a paid account, and do not sell or transfer one. Sharing a single subscription across several learners is the most common reason an account is suspended, because it is easy for us to see and unfair to everyone who pays.

4.4 Closing your account

You may close your account at any time from your profile, or by writing to us. Closing it ends your access to anything you were paying for. See the Refund Policy for what happens to money already paid, and the Privacy Notice for what happens to your data.

5. What we provide

The service currently includes the following. Any of it may change; see section 16.

6. Plans, prices and billing

6.1 Prices

Prices are shown on the pricing page and at checkout. Our base currency is the US dollar. Where we show a price in Kenyan shillings or another currency, that figure is converted at the rate in force when the page loads, and the exact amount your bank or mobile money provider debits may differ slightly because of their own conversion and fees.

6.2 What a plan gives you

Each plan lists what it unlocks. A monthly plan runs for one month from the day you pay. An annual plan runs for one year. A lifetime purchase is a single payment for continuing access, which is described in more detail in 6.5.

6.3 Renewal

We do not currently take a payment automatically when a term ends. Your access continues until the end of the period you paid for, and then stops until you choose to pay again. If we ever introduce automatic renewal, we will tell you before it applies to your account, and we will make cancelling it at least as easy as starting it.

6.4 Upgrading

If you move to a higher plan part-way through a term, we credit the unused portion of what you already paid against the new plan, and you pay the difference. The figure quoted at checkout is the net amount after that credit.

6.5 What "lifetime" means

6.6 Individual guide purchases

A business guide bought on its own is a one-off purchase. It stays in your account and you can read it again whenever you like, for as long as the platform runs. It is not a subscription and nothing further is charged for it.

6.7 Taxes

Prices are shown inclusive of any tax we are required to charge. If you need a receipt for your own records or accounts, one is emailed automatically on every successful payment, and every payment is also listed under Billing in your profile.

7. How you pay

We accept the following, and each is handled by the provider named, not by us:

We never see or store your card number, your PIN, or your wallet keys. Those go directly to the provider. What reaches us is a confirmation that a payment of a given amount succeeded or failed, and a reference we can use to trace it if something goes wrong.

Access unlocks when the provider confirms the payment to us, which is usually within seconds. M-Pesa and card payments are effectively immediate. Cryptocurrency depends on network confirmations and can take longer. If you have paid and nothing has unlocked after a reasonable wait, contact us with the reference and we will sort it out; do not pay a second time.

8. Refunds and cancellation

Refunds are dealt with fully in the Refund Policy, which forms part of these terms. In summary: if the service did not work as described, you get your money back. If you simply changed your mind, there is a short cooling-off window that depends on what you bought and how much of it you have used. Fraudulent or abusive refund requests are refused, and we will say so plainly rather than ignore you.

9. Content you post

9.1 It stays yours

Anything you write or upload remains yours: community posts, messages, code you save in the Playground, files you attach, your profile. We do not claim ownership of it and we will not sell it.

9.2 The permission you give us

To run the service at all, we need your permission to store your content, to display it to the people you intended to see it, to back it up, and to reformat it so it displays properly on different screens. That permission is limited to operating the service and it ends when you delete the content or close your account, except for copies in backups, which age out on the schedule in the Privacy Notice.

If you post something publicly in the community, other members can see it, and we may quote a short extract elsewhere on the platform to illustrate a discussion. We will not use your content in paid advertising without asking you first.

9.3 What you promise about it

By posting, you confirm that you have the right to post it, and that it is not:

• Someone else's copyrighted work used without permission.
• Unlawful, defamatory, harassing, or a threat to anyone.
• Malware, a phishing attempt, or anything designed to damage a reader's device.
• Personal data about someone else that they have not agreed to you sharing.
• Spam, or an advertisement dressed up as a post.

9.4 Moderation

We may remove content that breaks 9.3, and we may do so without warning where it is harmful or illegal. For anything less clear-cut we will normally tell you what was removed and why. If you think we got it wrong, reply and say so; a human will look again.

10. Content we own

The courses, lessons, quizzes, business guides, code examples, articles, design, logo, and the software that runs this platform belong to us or to whoever licensed them to us.

You may:

• Read, watch and work through anything your plan gives you access to.
• Take notes and keep them.
• Use the code examples in your own projects, including commercial ones. That is what they are for.
• Print a guide for your own use, or for use inside your own business.

You may not:

• Republish, resell, or redistribute our courses or guides, in whole or in substantial part.
• Share your account so that people who have not paid can use it.
• Scrape the platform, or use an automated tool to download course or guide content in bulk.
• Strip our name off a guide and pass it off as your own work.
• Use our name or logo in a way that suggests we endorse you when we do not.

11. Certificates and assessment

A certificate is issued when you pass the assessment for a course at or above the pass mark in force at the time. It records that you completed our course. It is not a professional qualification, it is not accredited by any national body, and we do not claim otherwise.

Assessment rules that apply to everyone:

• A failed attempt locks that quiz for a set period before you may retry. The current period is shown to you when it applies.
• There may be a limit on total attempts. Where there is, you are told before you start.
• Answers obtained from outside the course, or from another learner, are cheating. Where we find it, we revoke the certificate.

Each certificate carries a code that anyone can check on our verification page. If we revoke a certificate, verification will show that it is no longer valid, and we will tell you why before we do it.

12. Community and conduct

The community works because people are decent to each other. The rules are short:

• Be civil. Disagree with the argument, not the person.
• No harassment. Nothing targeting anyone's race, religion, gender, sexuality, disability, tribe or nationality. This one has no warnings.
• No spam. Do not post the same thing repeatedly, and do not use the community purely to advertise. Sharing what you built is welcome; a sales pitch is not.
• No scams. Fake job offers, fake investment schemes, phishing links and "send me money and I will teach you" posts get an immediate permanent ban.
• Do not post other people's private information.
• Answer honestly. A wrong answer given in good faith is fine, and someone will correct it. Confidently inventing an answer wastes a beginner's week.

Messaging is subject to the same rules. Unsolicited bulk messages to other members are treated as spam. If someone is bothering you, block them and report it; we would rather hear about it early.

13. The Playground

The Playground runs code in your own browser. It is a learning tool, not hosting. Specifically:

• Saved projects are stored on our servers so you can come back to them. Keep your own copy of anything you would be upset to lose.
• Do not use it to host a live website, to run anything that hammers a third-party service, or to attempt anything against another system.
• Do not save content that would break section 9.3.
• We may cap the number or size of saved projects, and any cap is shown in your plan.

14. Client projects and quotations

Client work is separate from the platform, and these terms cover only the parts that are not displaced by a signed proposal or contract for a specific project. Where a project contract and this document disagree, the project contract wins for that project.

• Quotations are valid for thirty days unless the quotation says otherwise, and are based on the scope described in them. A change to the scope changes the price, and we will say so before doing the extra work rather than after.
• Deposits. Our normal terms are half on commencement and half on delivery and approval. Larger projects can be split into milestones by agreement.
• Ownership. On full payment, the deliverables we built specifically for you become yours. Tools, libraries and components we already owned before the project, or which are open source, remain under their own licences.
• Your material. Text, images and logos you supply remain yours, and you confirm you have the right to use them.
• Delays. If a project stalls because we are waiting on content, feedback or access from you, the timeline moves by at least the length of the delay.
• Hosting and maintenance are separate services with their own terms, quoted separately.

15. Third parties we rely on

Parts of the service depend on other companies. We choose them carefully, but we do not control them, and an outage or a policy change on their side can affect you. The ones that matter:

Where a provider fails and it stops you receiving something you paid for, that is our problem to fix, and the Refund Policy applies. Where a provider fails and it merely inconveniences you, we will tell you what we know and when we expect it back.

16. Availability and change

We aim to keep the service running continuously, and we do not promise that it will be. We are a small business on shared hosting, not a bank. Maintenance, a hosting fault, a failure at a provider in section 15, or something none of us predicted can all take the site offline.

We may add features, change how something works, or withdraw part of the service. Where a change materially reduces what a paid plan gives you, we will either give you notice before it applies to your term, or refund the unused part of what you paid. Free features may change with less notice.

17. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or close an account where:

• These terms have been broken, particularly sections 9, 10 and 12.
• A payment is reversed, charged back, or turns out to be fraudulent.
• The account is being shared, resold, or used to distribute our content.
• We are required to by law.
• Continuing would put other members at risk.

Except where the law prevents us, or where telling you would help someone cause harm, we will tell you what happened and why. For anything short of fraud or abuse we will normally warn you first and give you a chance to put it right.

If we close a paid account for a breach, we do not refund the remaining term. If we close a paid account for a reason that is not your fault, we refund the unused part.

You can close your own account at any time. Some records survive it, because we are required to keep them: payment records for tax purposes, and moderation records where an account was closed for abuse. The Privacy Notice sets out exactly what and for how long.

18. Liability

Nothing here limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that the law does not allow us to limit. Your statutory rights as a consumer stand whatever this section says.

Subject to that:

• The educational content is information, not professional advice. A business guide describes what has worked for other traders. It is not accounting, legal or tax advice for your situation, and you should take proper advice before a significant decision.
• We are not liable for a business decision you took after reading something here, or for lost profit, lost data, or lost opportunity arising from it.
• We are not liable for what other members post, or for what happens if you deal privately with someone you met here.
• Where we are liable for something, our total liability is limited to what you paid us in the twelve months before the event, or five thousand Kenyan shillings if you paid us nothing.

19. Indemnity

If someone brings a claim against us because of something you did on the platform, such as posting content you had no right to post, you agree to cover our reasonable costs of dealing with it. We will tell you promptly if such a claim arises, and we will not settle it in your name without talking to you first.

20. Privacy and data

How we handle personal data is set out in the Privacy Notice, and which cookies we set is set out in the Cookie Policy. Both form part of this agreement. We process personal data in line with the Data Protection Act 2019, and you have the rights that Act gives you, including the right to a copy of your data and the right to ask us to delete it.

21. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of Kenya, and the courts of Kenya have jurisdiction over any dispute.

Before anyone goes to court, please talk to us. Almost everything is a misunderstanding that one honest email fixes:

1. Write to support@merikagency.com setting out the problem and what you would like us to do. We aim to reply within two working days and to resolve it within fourteen.
2. If that does not settle it, either of us may propose mediation by a mediator we both agree on, in Eldoret or online. Each side pays its own costs and we split the mediator's fee.
3. If mediation does not settle it, either of us may go to court.

Nothing in this section stops you complaining to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner about a data matter, or to any other regulator, at any time.

22. Changes to these terms

We will change this document from time to time, because the platform changes. When we do:

• The "last updated" date at the top changes.
• For a change that materially affects your rights or what you pay, we will email registered account holders at least fourteen days before it takes effect, and show a notice on the site.
• For a correction, a clarification or a new section describing a new feature, we simply publish it.

If you do not accept a change, close your account before it takes effect and tell us; if you were part-way through a paid term, we will refund the unused part.

23. General

• Whole agreement. These terms, together with the Privacy Notice, the Cookie Policy and the Refund Policy, are the whole agreement between us about the platform. For client work, a signed proposal takes precedence over this document.
• If a clause fails. If a court finds part of this unenforceable, the rest still applies.
• Not enforcing something is not giving it up. If we do not act on a breach immediately, we keep the right to act on it later.
• Transfer. You may not transfer your rights under these terms to someone else. We may transfer ours if the business is sold, and if that happens we will tell you and your rights will not be reduced by it.
• Nobody else can rely on this. These terms create rights for you and for us, not for third parties.
• Events outside our control. Neither of us is liable for a failure caused by something genuinely beyond our control, such as a national internet outage, a natural disaster or an act of government.
• Language. This agreement is written in English. A translation is offered for convenience only and the English version governs.

24. Contact

Questions about this document are welcome, and asking one before you buy is a great deal cheaper than a dispute afterwards.