Terms of Service

Last updated: 27 August 2026

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your access to and use of the services provided by Xcobean Systems Limited ("Xcobean", "we", "us", or "our"). By accessing our website, creating an account, or purchasing any service, you agree to be bound by these Terms.

1. Acceptance of Terms

By accessing or using any Xcobean service, you acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to be bound by these Terms, our Privacy Policy, and our Acceptable Use Policy. If you are entering into these Terms on behalf of a company or other legal entity, you represent that you have the authority to bind that entity.

If you do not agree to these Terms, you must not use our services.

2. Definitions

• "Client", "you", "your": the individual or entity that registers for and/or uses our services
• "Services": all products, platforms, and professional services offered by Xcobean, including but not limited to cloud hosting, colocation, connectivity, managed IT, communications, cybersecurity, and business applications
• "Client Portal": the online account management area accessible via our website
• "Content": any data, files, applications, or materials you upload, store, or transmit through our services

3. Our Services

Xcobean provides enterprise technology services including, but not limited to:

• Cloud & Infrastructure: virtual private servers, dedicated servers, cloud hosting, backup and disaster recovery
• Colocation: rack space, power, and cooling in our data-centre facilities
• Network & Connectivity: internet transit, IP addressing (AS329239), MPLS, and SD-WAN
• Managed IT Services: monitoring, patching, remote and onsite support
• Unified Communications. 3CX, VoIP, SIP trunking, and collaboration tools
• Cybersecurity: firewall management, endpoint protection, vulnerability assessments, and incident response
• Business Productivity. Zoho, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, and custom integrations

Service specifications, features, and pricing are described on our website and in individual service agreements.

4. Account Registration and Responsibilities

4.1 To access most services, you must register for an account and provide accurate, complete, and current information.

4.2 You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account credentials and for all activity that occurs under your account.

4.3 You must notify us immediately at info@xcobean.co.ke if you suspect any unauthorised use of your account.

4.4 You must be at least 18 years old to create an account.

4.5 We reserve the right to suspend or terminate accounts that contain false, outdated, or incomplete information.

7. Acceptable Use

Your use of our services is subject to our Acceptable Use Policy, which is incorporated into these Terms by reference. Violations of the AUP may result in service suspension or termination.

8. Intellectual Property

8.1 Our IP. All content, trademarks, logos, software, and materials on the Xcobean website and platforms are the property of Xcobean Systems Limited or its licensors and are protected by Kenyan and international intellectual property laws.

8.2 Your Content. You retain all ownership rights in the content you upload to our services. By using our services, you grant us a limited licence to host, store, and transmit your content solely for the purpose of providing the services.

8.3 You may not copy, modify, distribute, or reverse-engineer any Xcobean proprietary software or materials without our prior written consent.

9. Data Protection

9.1 We process personal data in accordance with our Privacy Policy and the Kenya Data Protection Act 2019.

9.2 Where we process personal data on your behalf (i.e., as a data processor), the terms of our Data Processing Agreement shall apply.

9.3 You are responsible for ensuring that your use of our services complies with all applicable data protection laws, including obtaining necessary consents from your end users.

10. Service Suspension and Termination

10.1 By us. We may suspend or terminate your services on written notice, or without notice where immediate action is required to protect the network or to comply with law or regulation, if:

• You breach these Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy
• Your account has an overdue balance exceeding 14 days
• Your use of services poses a security risk or disrupts other clients
• We are required to do so by law or regulation

10.5 By you. You may cancel your services at any time by submitting a cancellation request through the Client Portal or by contacting us. Cancellation will take effect at the end of the current billing period unless otherwise agreed.

10.6 Data after termination. Upon termination, we will retain your data for 30 days to allow retrieval. After this period, data will be permanently deleted unless a longer retention is required by law.

11. Limitation of Liability

11.1 To the maximum extent permitted by Kenyan law, Xcobean's total aggregate liability for any claim arising out of or related to these Terms or our services shall not exceed the total fees paid by you to Xcobean during the 12 months preceding the claim.

11.2 In no event shall Xcobean be liable for any indirect, incidental, special, consequential, or punitive damages, including but not limited to loss of profits, data, business opportunities, or goodwill.

11.3 These limitations apply regardless of the theory of liability (contract, tort, strict liability, or otherwise) and even if Xcobean has been advised of the possibility of such damages.

12. Indemnification

You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless Xcobean, its directors, officers, employees, and agents from any claims, damages, losses, liabilities, and expenses (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of or related to your use of our services, your violation of these Terms, or your infringement of any third-party rights.

13. Force Majeure

Neither party shall be liable for any failure or delay in performance due to circumstances beyond its reasonable control, including but not limited to natural disasters, war, terrorism, pandemics, government actions, power failures, internet or telecommunications failures, fibre cuts, or acts of third parties. The affected party shall notify the other party promptly and use reasonable efforts to mitigate the impact.

14. Dispute Resolution and Governing Law

14.1 Contracting entity. All services under these Terms are contracted with and provided by Xcobean Systems Limited, a company incorporated in the Republic of Kenya (Reg. No. PVT-GYUX6GP), whose registered office is at 11th Floor, Britam Towers, Nairobi. The same company is registered in the Republic of Rwanda as a foreign company under Article 23 of Law N° 007/2021 of 05/02/2021 governing companies, under company code 120711928, with a registered office at Gishushu, Nyarutarama, Remera, Gasabo, Kigali. That registration is a registration of the same legal person and does not create a separate contracting party. Your contract is with Xcobean Systems Limited wherever you or the services are located, and Kenyan law governs it. Nothing in these Terms removes any right you have under the mandatory law of the country in which you are resident or established that cannot be excluded by agreement.

14.2 Governing law. These Terms are governed by and construed in accordance with the laws of the Republic of Kenya.

14.3 Informal resolution. Before initiating formal proceedings, both parties agree to attempt to resolve disputes through good-faith negotiation for a period of at least 30 days.

14.4 Jurisdiction. Any disputes that cannot be resolved informally shall be submitted to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of Nairobi, Kenya.

14.5 Arbitration. For enterprise clients, disputes may alternatively be resolved through binding arbitration under the Nairobi Centre for International Arbitration (NCIA) rules, if both parties agree in writing.

15. Changes to These Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. We will provide at least 30 days' notice of material changes by email or through the Client Portal. Your continued use of our services after the effective date of the updated Terms constitutes your acceptance of the changes.

16. General Provisions

16.1 Assignment by you. You may not assign, novate, subcontract or otherwise transfer these Terms, or any of your rights or obligations under them, without our prior written consent, which will not be unreasonably withheld.

16.2 Assignment by us. We may assign or novate these Terms, in whole or in part, to any successor in title, to any company in the same group, or to a purchaser of the business or assets to which these Terms relate, on written notice to you.

16.3 Subcontractors. We may engage subcontractors and third-party suppliers to perform any part of the services. We remain responsible to you for anything we subcontract as if we had performed it ourselves, and our obligations to you are unaffected. The third parties that process personal data on our behalf are listed in our Privacy Policy.

16.4 Notices. Any notice under these Terms shall be in writing and delivered by hand, by prepaid registered post, or by email to the addresses at clause 18 or to your registered account email. Notice by email is deemed given on the next business day after transmission, provided no delivery failure is received.

16.5 Entire agreement. These Terms, together with the Acceptable Use Policy, the Privacy Policy, the Data Processing Agreement and any signed order form or service schedule, form the entire agreement between us in relation to the services, and supersede any prior discussions or proposals. Where a signed order form or service schedule conflicts with these Terms, the signed document prevails for that engagement.

16.6 Waiver. A failure or delay by either party in enforcing any provision is not a waiver of that provision or of any right to enforce it later.

16.7 No third-party rights. A person who is not a party to these Terms has no right to enforce any of them.

17. Severability

If any provision of these Terms is found to be invalid or unenforceable, the remaining provisions shall continue in full force and effect. The invalid provision shall be modified to the minimum extent necessary to make it valid and enforceable.

18. Contact Information

For questions about these Terms, please contact us:

Qootuma supplement

Last updated: 17 September 2026

Q1. What Qootuma is, and what it is not

Qootuma is a private, invite-only circle. A member who is travelling anyway can hand-carry another member's documents, and a member making a road journey can share the car with another member. That is the whole of it.

Qootuma introduces people. It carries nothing itself. It is not a courier, a postal operator, a freight forwarder, a clearing or forwarding agent, a common carrier, a taxi or a public service vehicle operator. It does not collect, hold, pack, seal, transport, clear, insure or deliver anything, and it is not a party to whatever two members agree between themselves.

Qootuma takes no cut. It charges no fee, commission, percentage or handling charge on anything carried or on any seat shared, and it never holds money on behalf of a member. Its income is membership subscriptions and voluntary donations, and nothing else. There is no advertising, and member data is never sold.

Q2. Membership is by invitation only

• You can only join on an invitation code minted by an existing member for you by name. A code is single use and bound to the phone number or email address it was minted for, and it will not work for anyone else. A member's code lasts thirty days; a code issued by the Qootuma team can be given a life of up to ninety.
• A member may only invite someone who is already in that member's own phone book, matched through the contact check described in the Privacy Policy. Qootuma's own team can also issue a code to someone outside any member's phone book, for introductions we make ourselves.
• You must be at least eighteen years old, you must join under your own name, and you must show a real photograph of your own face.
• One person, one account. You may not hold a second account, join on someone else's behalf, or pass your account to another person.
• Who you bring in reflects on you. The chain of who invited whom is kept, and it is visible to the team. Bringing in someone you do not actually know is a breach of these terms.

Q3. Documents only, always

Members may carry documents and nothing else. Documents means papers: title deeds, charges and discharges, transfers, tax papers, court papers, contracts and other signed papers of the same kind.

You must never ask a member to carry, and you must never agree to carry:

• money in any form, bank notes, cheques, bank cards, or any other monetary or bearer instrument
• goods of any kind, whether or not they are for sale, including electronics, jewellery, precious metals and stones, and samples
• anything dutiable, anything that must be declared to customs, and anything subject to an import or export licence
• medicines, supplements, narcotics or any other regulated or controlled substance
• weapons, ammunition, or anything designed to cause harm
• perishables, liquids, live animals, and anything hazardous
• anything unlawful in the country you are leaving, the country you are entering, or any country you pass through

Every request to a member carries an acknowledgement that it is a documents-only request, and the app will not send the request without it. You are entitled to see what you are being asked to carry before you accept it, and you may refuse or hand back anything, at any point, for any reason or for none. Customs, export and exchange-control rules are yours to observe; Qootuma neither advises on them nor clears anything on your behalf.

Carrying anything other than documents ends your membership.

Q4. Car pooling

• A member may offer seats on a road journey, or ask for one, between one and eight seats at a time. Car pools are road journeys by construction: both ends must be pinned on the map and within road reach of each other, so you cannot post a car pool between two continents.
• This is members sharing a journey, not a taxi service. Qootuma does not licence, insure, inspect, train or supervise any driver or vehicle, takes no payment for a seat, and is not a public service vehicle operator.
• A driving licence, valid insurance, a roadworthy vehicle and obedience to the traffic laws are the driver's own responsibility, and the driver alone answers for them.
• A car pool may also carry documents when the driver has said it may. The documents-only rule in Q3 applies to a car pool exactly as it applies to a flight.

Q5. Trust, verification and vouching

Trust in Qootuma is earned and it is computed by the server. You cannot set it yourself.

• Levels. Invited, then Real face (a photograph of you that passes the face check), then ID verified (your passport or national identity card, verified as set out in Q6), then Payment verified (a membership paid from an account in your own name), then Screened.
• Tiers. New, Known, Well-Known and SuperKnown, set by how many members say they know you: five, twenty and fifty respectively. Saying you know someone is a statement about the world, not a courtesy.
• What a level unlocks. Waving at a member, carrying for a member and vouching for a member all require ID verification. The most sensitive papers can be limited to members who have been screened.
• Vouching. To vouch for someone you must be ID verified, at least Known, and at least sixty days in the circle. You may give no more than three vouches in any thirty days and hold no more than ten open at once, and you must say what your relationship is and how you know the person. A vouch lasts twelve months and then lapses unless it is renewed.
• A vouch is your word, and it costs you if it was wrong. If a report against someone you vouched for is upheld, your own tier is frozen for ninety days and your vouches are revoked. Two upheld strikes and the account is removed.
• Screening. Screening means a check against public sanctions and wanted lists together with a police clearance certificate that you obtain and send us. We want to be straight about this: no service exists that lets us run a criminal-record check on a member, in Kenya or anywhere else, and we do not pretend otherwise.

Q6. Proving who you are

Identity verification is optional, but without it you cannot wave, carry or vouch. There are two routes, and both are described in full, including what is stored, in the Qootuma section of the Privacy Policy.

• The chip. The app reads the machine-readable zone on your passport or national identity card with the camera, then reads the secure chip over NFC, then takes a live selfie. The chip is checked against the issuing state's signature, the selfie is compared with the photograph held on the chip, and a liveness check confirms a living person took it. Pass all three and you are verified on the spot.
• The manual route. If your document has no chip, or the phone cannot read it, you can send a photograph of the document and a selfie instead. A member of the Qootuma team looks at them by hand and decides. Do not send anything you are not willing to have a person look at.
• One document verifies one account. If a document has already verified another account, the request goes to a person rather than being approved.
• Submitting a document that is not yours, or that has been altered, ends your membership and may be reported to the authorities.

Q7. How members behave

When you join you take a pledge. These are the same words, made concrete. You must not:

• use a name, photograph or document that is not your own, or hold yourself out as someone else
• carry for, or hand documents to, anyone who is not the member you agreed with
• take money for carrying, or offer money to have something carried
• pass another member's name, number, photograph, travel plans or messages outside Qootuma
• use the circle to find, follow, market to, recruit or sell to members
• harass, threaten, abuse or intimidate anybody, in a message, on a call or at a meeting
• copy, scrape or bulk-collect the membership, or automate the app

Meet in public. The app suggests busy, staffed meeting points at airports and can give both of you a check-in word to say out loud, so papers never go to the wrong person. Use them.

Q8. Membership, donations and refunds

• Membership is sold by the month, the quarter, the year, as a one-off lifetime membership, or as a plan for a firm. Prices are shown in the app before you pay, in United States dollars.
• Your first wave is free. After that a current membership is needed to start a connection.
• Payment is taken by the payment providers Xcobean uses, by M-Pesa, PayPal or card. Qootuma does not see or store your card number.
• A membership runs to the end of the period you paid for. Cancelling stops the next renewal; it does not shorten the period you have already bought, and part periods are not refunded except where the law requires it.
• Donations are voluntary, are not a payment for any service, and are not refundable.
• Rewards such as free months earned by referral have no cash value and cannot be exchanged.
• Whatever a member and a carrier do to thank one another is private between them, is not arranged, priced, guaranteed or taxed by Qootuma, and must never become a fee for carriage.

Q9. Reports, moderation and disputes

• Any member can report another for carrying something other than documents, for not turning up, for harassment, for a false profile, or for anything else that matters.
• Only Qootuma's owners moderate. Reports and verification decisions are taken by the small team that runs Qootuma. There are no volunteer moderators, no member juries, and no member can see another member's report.
• Where a report is upheld the outcome may be a warning, a frozen tier, a pause on carrying, suspension, or removal from the circle. Vouches given by a member who has been found at fault are revoked.
• Cancelling a handoff inside forty-eight hours of the meeting counts as a late cancellation. Three of those in a year pause your carrying for thirty days.
• A dispute between two members is between those two members. Qootuma is not an arbitrator, does not value a lost or delayed document, does not compensate for one, and cannot compel a member to pay another. What we will do, on a lawful request or where a member asks us for their own record, is give what we hold: the trail of the handoff, the timestamps, the ratings and the messages on that connection.
• There is no insurance. If you see the word cover anywhere in the app it is marked as not yet available, and it is not available. Keep a certified copy of anything irreplaceable before you send it.
• The SOS button alerts the Qootuma team with your location and hands you the emergency number for the country you are in. It is not an emergency service. If you are in danger, call the police.

Q10. Leaving, and being asked to leave

• You can delete your account from Settings at any time. You are signed out at once on every device and you come out of the circle immediately. The record is held for thirty days so that a deletion made in error can be undone, and is erased after that, along with the photographs and files you uploaded.
• We may suspend or end a membership, with notice where we reasonably can and without it where a member or the circle is at risk, for a breach of these terms or of the pledge.
• Ending your membership does not end anything you already owe another member, or anything you already agreed with them.

Q11. What we are and are not responsible for

Qootuma introduces members to one another and keeps the record of what they agreed. It does not carry, guarantee, insure or supervise anything. To the fullest extent the law allows, Xcobean is not liable for the loss, delay, damage, seizure, disclosure or misuse of anything a member hands to another member, for anything that happens on a shared journey, or for the conduct of any member. The limits in clause 11 of the company Terms above apply, and for a member the total is in any event limited to the membership fees you have paid in the twelve months before the claim. Nothing here excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Q12. Changes, law and contact

We will post any change to this supplement on this page with a new date, and tell you in the app where the change is a material one. These terms are governed by the law of Kenya, and the courts at Nairobi have jurisdiction, without taking away any right you have under the law of the country you live in that cannot be given up by agreement.