Terms of Service

This agreement is between you, the adult who opens the paid account, and HELLOAIDA (Pty) Ltd, which trades as Hello Aida. If you opened the account for a child in your care, that child is not a party to it. A child cannot be bound by a contract in South African law, so every obligation and every payment under this agreement is yours.

We may change our contact details by updating this table

Aida is built for learners in Grade R to Grade 12. Most of them are children, so the law treats their personal information with extra care and we do the same.

You must be 18 or older to open a paid account. There are two kinds of account holder:

• A parent or guardian, opening an account for one or more learners in their care, or someone acting with that guardian's permission
• An adult learner, 18 or older, studying for themselves. You are your own account holder, you consent for yourself, and the references below to your child do not apply to you

Children under 18 can register for and use a learner account, with parent or guardian consent where required. Only someone aged 18 or older may start and pay for a paid subscription, including a card-verification trial or a discounted subscription. Having your own bank card does not change that.

If you are under 18 and would like a paid subscription, ask a parent or guardian aged 18 or older to arrange and pay for it for your separate learner account. The adult-payer requirement does not prevent you from registering for or using a learner account.

You consent on your child's behalf. Section 35 of the Protection of Personal Information Act allows us to process a child's personal information where a competent person, normally a parent or guardian, has consented. You give that consent during sign-up.

You may withdraw that consent at any time. Tell us at hello@helloaida.ai and we will stop processing and close the learner's account. Withdrawing consent does not undo processing that was lawful before you withdrew it, and it does not refund fees already due for the current period.

Accounts.

• One account holder, one learner profile, depending on your plan
• Each learner has their own profile, so their work and history stay separate
• Do not share your password. If you think someone else has it, change it.
• You are responsible for what happens on your account, unless someone gained access through a failure on our side

If a learner turns 18 while using Aida, they may take over their own account.

Aida is an AI tutor. It holds a conversation with your child about their schoolwork, aligned to the CAPS, IEB and Cambridge curricula for Grades R to 12, and is multilingual.

It can explain a concept, work through a problem, set practice questions, read an uploaded page or photograph, listen and respond by voice, and track progress over time.

Please read the three statements below during sign-up. They are the most important things to understand about an AI tutor, and we would rather you know them now than discover them later.

• Aida can be wrong. It generates its answers. It may state something incorrect with confidence. Treat its answers the way you would treat a capable but fallible tutor, and check anything that matters against the textbook, the teacher or the marking memo.
• Aida does not replace a teacher or a school. It is a supplementary tool for practice and explanation. It is not a curriculum, not an assessment, and not a substitute for classroom instruction.
• Aida is not a counsellor, a doctor or an emergency service. If your child tells Aida something that suggests they are in danger or in distress, Aida will respond with care and point them to help, and we may contact you or the relevant authorities as described in our Privacy Policy and Safeguarding Policy. It is not a crisis service, it is not monitored in real time by a person, and it must never be relied on as one. In an emergency, call 112 from a mobile phone, 10111 for the police, or 10177 for an ambulance. Childline South Africa is on 116, free from every network, 24 hours a day.

We will tell you before we materially reduce or remove a feature you are paying for, and you may cancel without penalty if we do.

Plans. R99 per month. R199 per month. All prices include VAT at 15 percent. A free tier is available with a limit of 20 free questions.

Payment. We use two payment providers. New subscriptions are processed by Moment. Subscriptions taken out before 1 November 2026 continue to be collected by Netcash (Pty) Ltd, and stay with Netcash unless you tell us otherwise. Your account settings show which one handles yours. Neither arrangement changes the price or these terms. We never see or store your full card number. By subscribing you authorise the relevant provider to charge your chosen payment method each month until you cancel.

Renewal. Your subscription renews automatically each month. There is no fixed term and no minimum period.

Your seven-day cooling off right. Section 44 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act lets you cancel a new subscription within seven days of signing up, for any reason or none, and we will refund you in full within 30 days. You do not have to explain yourself.

Cancelling after that. Cancel at any time from your account settings or by emailing hello@helloaida.ai. Your access continues to the end of the period you have paid for, and you are not charged again.

Refunds.

• If we suspend or close your account for a reason other than your material breach of this agreement, we refund the unused part of the period, pro rata
• If the service is materially defective and we cannot fix it within a reasonable time after you tell us, you may cancel and we refund the unused part
• Otherwise we do not refund the current period once it has started, except under the cooling off right above

Failed payments. If a payment fails we will tell you and try again. If it has not succeeded after 2 days we may suspend access until it does. We will not delete your child's work during a suspension for non-payment.

Our Privacy Policy sets this out in full and forms part of this agreement. The essentials are here because they matter.

What we process. Your name and contact details, your child's first name, last name, grade, school and language, their conversations with Aida, any documents or photographs they upload, voice recordings where voice is used, and usage and progress data.

Voice. Where your child uses voice, we record what they say and convert it to text so Aida can respond. You do not have to use voice.

What leaves South Africa. Aida's answers are generated by a multiple of LLMs, whose servers are in the United States. Your child's messages, uploads and voice recordings are sent there to produce a response.

We do not sell your information, and we do not share it with advertising networks.

Your rights under POPIA. You may ask us what we hold about your child (section 23), ask us to correct or delete it (section 24), withdraw your consent (section 11(3)(a)), and complain to the Information Regulator (section 74). Write to our Information Officer at hello@helloaida.ai.

Deletion. We will delete your child's personal information on request, except where the law requires us to keep something, for example accounting records under the Companies Act and the Tax Administration Act. Where we must keep something we will tell you what it is, why, and for how long. Our retention periods are set out in the Privacy Policy.

If something goes wrong. If personal information is accessed by someone who should not have it, we will notify the Information Regulator and you, as section 22 of POPIA requires, as soon as reasonably possible after we establish what happened.

Use Aida for learning. Please do not:

• Share your password, or let anyone outside your household use your account
• Try to get into another user's account or data
• Upload anything illegal, or anything sexual, hateful or violent
• Use Aida to produce work your child then submits as their own where the school forbids it. Schools set their own rules on AI and those rules apply
• Scrape the service, or use bots, crawlers or scripts to extract content in bulk
• Get around rate limits, paywalls, sign-in or content filters, or help anyone else do so
• Resell, sublicense or white-label the service, or build a product on top of it, without our written agreement
• Use Aida's responses to train, fine-tune, distil or evaluate another AI model

These rules bind you as the account holder. The Learner Rules say the same things in language your child can read, and are worth going through together.

If you break these rules. We may suspend or close an account where we reasonably suspect a breach of this section, immediately and without notice where a learner's safety or the security of the service requires it. We may preserve access logs, request records and account data for as long as we need to investigate, and disclose them to law enforcement or a regulator where the law allows or requires it.

Nothing here limits any remedy we have. Unauthorised access to a computer system or data, unlawful interception of data, and the possession or use of tools for those purposes are criminal offences under the Cybercrimes Act 19 of 2020. Those offences apply to anyone, whether or not they hold an account with us or ever accepted these Terms. We reserve the right to lay a criminal complaint and to pursue civil remedies, including an interdict and damages.

This does not apply to good-faith security research. Inspecting the code, headers and cookies our website sends to your own browser is ordinary use of a browser and nothing in these Terms restricts it. If you find a weakness, tell us at hello@helloaida.ai. Where you keep to the conditions in our Privacy Policy we will not pursue you, and we say so there in terms.

Your uploads stay yours. Notes, photographs of a page, past papers, worksheets. You keep whatever rights you have in them. You give us permission to store and process them for one purpose only: helping your child with the work in front of them. We do not use your uploads to train AI models and we do not share them with anyone except the service providers listed in our Privacy Policy. The permission ends when you delete the material or close the account.

Please only upload what you are allowed to. Most textbooks, past papers and worksheets are protected by copyright and belong to a publisher or an examining body. You may generally use a copy you already own for your child's own study. You may not upload a whole textbook, or material you do not have the right to use.

What belongs to us. The Aida platform, our software, our teaching method, our prompts and configuration, our name, logo and designs are ours. You may not copy, modify, distribute or create derivative works from them. Nothing in this agreement transfers any of it to you.

What Aida generates. Explanations, practice questions and feedback produced for your child are yours to use for their learning, subject to section 6 above.

What we owe you. We will provide Aida with reasonable care and skill, to the standard you are entitled to expect under section 54 of the Consumer Protection Act. We will keep your child's personal information secure as section 19 of POPIA requires. Neither of those obligations is excluded or limited anywhere in this agreement.

Please read the following during sign-up. We are required to draw it to your attention separately, and we would rather you read it than scroll past it.

Limits on our liability. We are not liable for your child's marks, results or academic outcomes. We are not liable for loss you could not reasonably have expected, for lost profit, or for the acts of third parties whose services we link to.

This limit does not apply to death or personal injury, to loss caused by our gross negligence or deliberate wrongdoing, to a failure to keep your child's personal information secure, or to anything else the law does not permit us to limit.

Service availability. We aim to keep Aida running but we do not promise uninterrupted access. We will try to give reasonable notice of planned maintenance where we can. We are not responsible for failures caused by events outside our reasonable control, including load shedding, network outages and failures at our service providers, for as long as those events last.

Nothing in this agreement excludes or limits any right you have under the Consumer Protection Act, POPIA, the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, or any other law that does not permit it. Where a term of this agreement conflicts with such a right, the right applies and the term does not.

You may close your account at any time, from your settings or by emailing hello@helloaida.ai. Section 4 covers what happens to fees.

We may suspend or close your account if you breach this agreement materially, if payment fails and stays unpaid, or if we must do so by law. Except where a learner's safety or the security of the service requires immediate action, we will tell you first, give reasons, and give you a fair chance to put it right. If you think we got it wrong, write to hello@helloaida.ai and a person, not an automated system, will look at it again.

After an account closes we delete or anonymise the learner's personal information within 60 days, except what the law requires us to keep.

Changes to these terms. For changes to price, to how we handle your child's personal information, or to this section, we will ask you to accept the new version when you next sign in. Continuing to use Aida is not how you accept a material change. Minor corrections take effect when published.

Complaints. Write to hello@helloaida.ai. We will acknowledge within 5 business days and respond within 5 business days.

Governing law. South African law governs this agreement. You and we consent to the jurisdiction of the Magistrates' Court for any claim within its monetary jurisdiction, under section 45 of the Magistrates' Courts Act, and otherwise to the Western Cape Division of the High Court.

If part of this agreement is unenforceable, the rest stands. If we do not enforce a term on one occasion, we may still enforce it later. You may not transfer your rights under this agreement without our consent. We may transfer ours if our business is sold, and we will tell you if that happens.

Contact: email hello@helloaida.ai