[ OWNERSHIP ]
Who owns what?
Your data is yours. Full stop. Every customer record, order, booking and document on your platform belongs to your business, and you can export all of it — in standard, open formats — whenever you like. Not "on request, within 30 days". Whenever you like.
The platform code is built and maintained by DuskLine and licensed to your business for as long as you're with us — that's how we keep one flat fee low instead of charging agency build prices upfront. On longer terms we can arrange source-code escrow, so the code that runs your business is protected even from us.
[ LEAVING ]
What happens if we leave?
You leave. Cleanly. Contracts run 3, 6 or 12 months — never "forever with a cancellation department". At the end of your term you walk away with a full export of every record, your domain, and your email — all of which were always yours. We hand over to you or your next provider properly, because hostage tactics are for companies whose product can't keep you on its own.
[ DATA RESIDENCY ]
Where does our data actually live?
On servers in South Africa — not scattered across some overseas cloud region you've never heard of. And your business gets its own isolated application and database: your records never share tables, software or logins with any other DuskLine client. One client's problem can never become yours.
[ POPIA ]
Are we covered on POPIA?
Privacy is built in, not bolted on. Marketing consent and opt-outs are honoured automatically with suppression lists (an opt-out is a legal duty, so it survives everything — even data deletion). We collect only what your business actually needs, and export and full-erasure tooling is part of the platform, so a data-subject request is a button, not a crisis.
[ BACKUPS ]
What about backups?
Automated snapshots run throughout the day, every day, with multiple copies retained. Your data lives outside the deployment path, so a software update can physically never touch it. Encrypted off-site copies are available for businesses that want them. And restores get tested — a backup nobody has ever restored is a rumour, not a backup.
[ 2AM ]
What happens when something breaks at 2am?
We're awake — that's rather the point of the night shift. Every client platform is health-checked around the clock, minute by minute. If something goes dark, we're alerted within about two minutes, services restart themselves in seconds, and a human (us) looks at the cause. Most clients find out something happened by reading about it in their portal after it's already fixed.
[ THE BUS QUESTION ]
What if DuskLine disappears tomorrow?
Fair question to ask a small company — so here's the honest answer. Your platform runs on standard, boring, widely-known technology, deliberately: no exotic frameworks, no vendor-locked databases, nothing a competent developer couldn't take over. Your full data export is always available. Handover documentation exists, and code escrow can be arranged on longer terms. You would be inconvenienced — you would not be stranded.
[ SECURITY ]
How is our platform secured?
HTTPS everywhere, properly hashed passwords (the kind that can't be "decrypted", because they were never encrypted — they're one-way), locked-down sessions, brute-force lockouts, rate limits on everything public, and security headers as standard. Each platform is isolated from every other. We've been through a formal third-party due-diligence review and came out with the deal.
[ PRICING ]
Why "never per seat" — what's the catch?
No catch, just a different model. Per-seat pricing punishes you for hiring — your software bill grows every time your business does, which is absurd. DuskLine charges for the platform, flat, and every person on your team gets an account included.
The honest fine print: each plan includes a healthy amount of development every month, and hosting, security, backups and bug-fixes never count against it. If you ever want more built in a month than your plan carries, we quote it upfront and you decide — nobody gets surprise-billed, ever.
