Terms of service

These terms are the agreement between you and Phi Aurum Group (Pty) Ltd, registration 2026/576088/07 (“we”, “us”), which owns and operates Exuvia. By creating an account you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not create an account.

1. What Exuvia does

Exuvia stores husbandry records for captive invertebrates — specimens, enclosures, feeding offers and their outcomes, moults, health events, rehousings, notes and photographs — and uses those records to show you what is due. It does not automate anything in an enclosure and it does not make decisions on your behalf.

2. Who may use it

• You must be 18 or older.
• An account is for one person. Do not share your password. You are responsible for everything done through your account.
• Give a working email address. It is how we send account confirmations, password resets, and notice of changes to these terms.
• You must keep your own animals lawfully. Exuvia does not check whether a species is legal for you to hold, and any legality information shown is informational only.

3. Acceptable use

Do not use Exuvia to:

• break the law, including wildlife, import and trade law;
• access another keeper’s records, or attempt to bypass the checks that keep collections separate;
• scrape, overload, probe or disrupt the service, or reverse engineer it except where the law says you may;
• upload content you have no right to upload, or anything unlawful.

4. Your records stay yours

You own your records and photographs. You give us only the permission we need to run the service for you: to store your content, back it up, process it, and display it back to you. We do not publish it, sell it, share it with other keepers, or use it to train machine learning models.

You can download everything at any time from your data export, as CSV files in a ZIP archive, without asking us first. That is deliberate: leaving should never require our cooperation.

5. Exuvia is in beta

• There is no uptime guarantee. Features may change, be reworked, or be removed.
• We may need to take the service down for maintenance, sometimes without warning.
• We take database backups and retain them for seven days. Backups are a safety net for us, not a restore service for individual accounts. Keep your own export if a record matters to you.
• Bugs are likely. If you find one, tell us at phiaurum.za@gmail.com.

6. Price

Exuvia is free while it is in beta. We take no payment today and there is nothing to cancel.

If we introduce paid plans:

• we will tell you by email at least 30 days beforehand, and you will never be charged without actively choosing a plan;
• there will be a free tier that stays free, with a limit on how many animals it holds rather than on what Exuvia does for them;
• no tier gets weaker husbandry warnings than another. The post-moult feeding block, feeding-due warnings, the prey check and moult records work identically on the free tier and the paid one. We will not sell an animal’s safety as an upgrade;
• if a paid plan lapses, we do not delete anything and export keeps working. What does happen is that Exuvia stops working for you: it stops accepting records and stops giving husbandry prompts, together and at the same moment. It has to be both. If it kept prompting while refusing your records, it would go on telling you to feed an animal that has since moulted, from a history you were no longer allowed to correct. A lapsed payment must never be the reason a spider is offered prey while its fangs are still soft, so a lapsed account is silent rather than wrong.

Pricing sets out what each tier includes, and billing and refunds covers payment, cancellation and lapsing in more detail.

7. Support

Exuvia is built and run by one person. Support is by email at phiaurum.za@gmail.com. We aim to reply within three business days, and to acknowledge anything that looks like data loss or a security problem within one business day. During beta these are intentions, not guarantees.

8. Ending the agreement

You can close your account at any time from account deletion. Deletion is scheduled rather than instant: your account is locked, you keep a 30-day window to change your mind, and after that your records are erased permanently and cannot be recovered. Export first if you want to keep anything.

We may suspend or close an account that breaks section 3, that we are legally required to act on, or that is being used to harm the service or another keeper. Where it is lawful and practical to do so, we will tell you first and give you a chance to export.

If we discontinue Exuvia entirely, we will give at least 60 days’ notice by email and keep export working for that whole period.

9. What we do not promise

Exuvia is provided as it is. To the fullest extent the law allows, we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that any reminder will reach you at a particular time. Reminders depend on email delivery and on your own devices, neither of which we control.

10. Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for lost profits, or for loss of data where you had the ability to export and did not. Our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the twelve months before the claim arose — which, during the free beta, is zero.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or your rights under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 and the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013. If you are a consumer in the EU or UK, your mandatory statutory rights are unaffected.

11. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. If a change materially affects you we will email you at least 30 days before it takes effect, and the effective date at the top of this page will change. Continuing to use Exuvia after that date means you accept the new terms. If you do not, close your account — you can still export.

12. Law and disputes

These terms are governed by the law of South Africa, and the courts of South Africa have jurisdiction. Please email us first; most problems are faster to fix than to argue about.

13. Contact

Phi Aurum Group (Pty) Ltd — phiaurum.za@gmail.com. Our postal address is available on request at that address.