Tymbr
Terms of service
Tymbr is in an invited early-access phase. Some details in these terms, such as the payment provider and the contact address, are still being finalised and appear in square brackets. We will replace them before general release.
1. Who we are
Tymbr is a transcription service. You record or upload audio, and we turn it into a transcript that shows who said what. The service is run by a sole proprietor in South Africa. The details below are given under section 43 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act.
| Full name | Gareth Saul, trading as 20 East |
|---|---|
| Legal status | Sole proprietor, South Africa |
| Physical address | 18 Lyndhurst Road, Kenilworth, Cape Town, 7708 |
| Telephone | no telephone line; email hello@tymbr.dev for questions and complaints |
| hello@tymbr.dev | |
| Website | https://tymbr.dev |
| Prices | Shown in rand, including VAT where applicable, on the pricing page and again before you pay |
| Codes of conduct | We are not a member of a self-regulatory body |
In these terms, "we" and "us" mean Gareth Saul trading as 20 East. "You" means the person who holds a Tymbr account. You agree to these terms when you buy credit.
2. Terms that limit our responsibility and place obligations on you
Please read this section before you buy credit. It contains every term that limits what we are responsible for, shifts risk to you, or asks you to confirm something. The Consumer Protection Act requires us to point these out clearly, so they are all here in one place. The purchase screen asks you to accept this section specifically. You agree to these terms when you buy credit.
What you confirm and take responsibility for
- You are the responsible party under the Protection of Personal Information Act for everything inside your recordings. You decide what to record, whom to record, and what to do with the transcript. We are your operator and act only on your instructions.
- You have a lawful basis to record every conversation you upload. Section 4 of the Regulation of Interception of Communications Act lets a party to a conversation record it. Recording a conversation you are not part of, or one that a law, a court order, or a professional rule says you may not record without consent, is your responsibility alone.
- You have told the people you record where the law or your professional rules require it, and you follow any rules that apply to your profession, such as those for attorneys, medical practitioners and financial advisers.
- Every person whose voiceprint you enrol has given you explicit, informed consent, in writing or on a recording, to have their voiceprint created and stored under your account. You keep evidence of that consent, you delete the voiceprint when they withdraw consent, and you do not enrol anyone under 18. Voiceprints are special personal information under section 26 of POPIA, and the consent under section 27(1)(a) is consent that you obtain.
- Transcripts are machine-generated and may be wrong. You check every transcript before you rely on it for anything legal, financial, medical, or contractual. We give no warranty that a transcript is accurate, complete, or attributes speech to the right speaker.
- Anything an AI agent or other software does with the credentials you create is your action. You choose the AI provider your agent uses and you are responsible for what that provider does with your data. We have no relationship with it.
- You answer requests from people in your recordings who want to see, correct or delete their information. We forward any request we receive to you.
Indemnity
You indemnify Gareth Saul trading as 20 East against all claims, complaints, regulatory fines, losses and costs, including legal costs on the attorney-and-client scale, that arise from your recordings, your voiceprint enrolments, your breach of these terms, your use of agent or API access, or any claim by a third party that you recorded or processed them unlawfully. This means you will cover those costs if they happen.
What we do not promise
- Tymbr is provided as it is, to the extent the Consumer Protection Act allows. It is in early access. We do not promise uninterrupted or error-free service.
- We may change or withdraw features on 14 days' notice by email.
- We never listen to, review, or use your recordings except to run the service for you, and we do not check whether you had the right to make them.
Limits on our liability
- To the maximum extent the Consumer Protection Act allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, loss of business or profit, or loss of data caused by your own deletion or by events beyond our reasonable control.
- Our total liability to you for all claims together is limited to the amount of credit you bought in the 12 months before the claim arose.
- These limits do not apply to loss caused by our gross negligence or wilful misconduct, to death or injury caused by our gross negligence, or to anything else the Consumer Protection Act or POPIA says we cannot exclude. Nothing in these terms takes away a right those Acts give you.
Suspension without refund
If we suspend or close your account because we reasonably believe you recorded unlawfully or enrolled a voiceprint without consent, credit you have already used is not refunded, and unused credit is not refunded either. Section 12 explains this.
3. Who can use Tymbr
You must be 18 or older, or be using Tymbr for a business you are authorised to act for. If you use Tymbr for a business, you confirm that you may accept these terms on its behalf, and "you" includes that business.
4. Your account
Your account is tied to one verified email address. You sign in with your Google account, and the verified Google email address becomes your account. Everything you store in Tymbr belongs to that one account and is not visible to any other account.
Keep your sign-in method secure. If you connect the desktop recorder, it receives a device credential that you can name and revoke at any time from the web app. Anything done through your account or your credentials counts as done by you until you tell us otherwise. Tell us straight away at hello@tymbr.dev if you think someone else has used your account.
5. Prepaid credit
Buying credit
Tymbr is prepaid. You buy credit in rand at the prices displayed at purchase. There is no subscription, no monthly fee and no automatic renewal. Payment is processed by Yoco (Yoco Technologies (Pty) Ltd, South Africa). We never see your full card details.
Using credit
Credit is used per minute of audio processed, rounded up to the next minute for each recording. The rate per minute is shown before you buy and again before you start a transcription. Because your credit is held in rand, the rate can change for future transcriptions as our own costs change, but credit you have already spent is never re-priced. Failed transcriptions are not charged. If we charge you in error, we will put the credit back.
How long credit lasts
Under section 63 of the Consumer Protection Act, prepaid credit does not expire until you have used it or three years have passed since you bought it, whichever comes first. We will show you the expiry date of each purchase in your account. We will not shorten this period.
Cooling-off and refunds
If you bought credit online, you may cancel within seven days of purchase and receive a refund of any credit you have not yet used, as section 44 of the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act allows. Credit you have already spent on transcription cannot be refunded, because the service was delivered with your consent. Outside the seven-day window, unused credit is not refundable except where section 10 or section 12 says otherwise.
6. Lawful recording and acceptable use
You are responsible for the audio you bring to Tymbr. Uploading a recording is your instruction to us to process it. We do not check whether you had the right to make it, and we rely on the confirmations in section 2.
Other people's voices and words in your recordings are their personal information. When you process that information through Tymbr, you are the responsible party under POPIA and we act as your operator. These terms are the written agreement between responsible party and operator that section 21(2) of POPIA requires. As your operator we will:
- process recordings, transcripts, rosters and voiceprints only on your instruction and only to run the service for you;
- keep them confidential and not disclose them unless the law requires it;
- apply the security measures described in our privacy policy;
- tell you as soon as we reasonably can if we believe your content has been accessed without authority, so that you can meet your own duties under section 22 of POPIA.
You may not use Tymbr to:
- record anyone without a lawful basis, or in breach of a confidentiality duty you owe them;
- upload audio you have no right to process;
- enrol a voiceprint for anyone who has not consented, or for anyone under 18;
- attempt to access another account, probe our systems, or interfere with the service;
- resell access to Tymbr or run it as a service for third parties without our written agreement.
7. Your recordings and transcripts
You own your recordings, transcripts, speaker rosters and any edits you make. We claim no rights in them. You give us only the limited licence we need to store, process and display them back to you and to the operators listed in our privacy policy, for the sole purpose of running the service for you.
Raw recordings are kept unchanged. You can download them and your transcripts at any time, and you can delete them at any time. Deleting removes the item from the live service immediately and from backups within 30 days. Once you delete something we cannot recover it, and keeping your own copies is your responsibility.
8. Voiceprints
A voiceprint is a mathematical profile of how a person sounds. Tymbr uses voiceprints to recognise the same speaker across your recordings. Voiceprints are biometric information and are special personal information under section 26 of POPIA. We process them only under the consent you obtain from each person, as section 27(1)(a) allows.
You may enrol a voiceprint for yourself. For anyone else, the confirmations in section 2 apply: explicit, informed consent that you can prove, deletion when they withdraw it, and no one under 18. The enrolment screen asks you to confirm this for each person, and we record that confirmation with a timestamp as evidence that you gave it. If someone asks you to remove their voiceprint, you must delete it, and Tymbr gives you a control to do so.
Voiceprints are stored encrypted, are never shared between accounts, and are deleted when you delete them or close your account.
9. Connecting your own agent
Tymbr offers Model Context Protocol access so that an AI agent you choose can read your transcripts. You create the credentials, you choose the agent, and you decide what it may do. Anything your agent reads, writes or sends is your action, including what happens to that data once it leaves Tymbr and anything the agent's AI provider does with it. We have no contract with that provider and no control over it. Revoke a credential the moment you no longer trust the agent that holds it.
10. Availability and early access
Tymbr is currently in an invited early-access phase. We aim to keep it available, but we do not promise uninterrupted service, and features may change or be removed while we learn what works. We will give you 14 days' notice by email before removing a feature you have paid to use. If we shut the service down, we will refund unused credit.
11. What we do not do
- We do not generate AI summaries, action items or emails from your meetings. Your transcript is the product.
- We do not sell, rent or share your data for advertising.
- We do not use your recordings, transcripts or voiceprints to train models, ours or anyone else's.
- We do not send marketing messages unless you have asked for them.
- We do not review your recordings to check that you had the right to make them. That is your responsibility.
12. Suspension and closing your account
We may suspend or close your account immediately, without prior notice, if we reasonably believe you are recording unlawfully, enrolling voiceprints without consent, or breaking section 6 in any other way, if your payment is reversed, or if a regulator or court requires it. We will tell you why as soon as we are allowed to and give you a chance to respond.
If we close your account for any of these reasons, credit you have already used is not refunded. Unused credit is refunded unless the closure is for recording unlawfully or enrolling voiceprints without consent, in which case it is forfeited to offset the cost of dealing with the matter.
You can close your account at any time. Before you do, download anything you want to keep. When the account closes we delete your recordings, transcripts, rosters, voiceprints and device credentials, and purge them from backups within 30 days. Any unused credit is forfeited unless a refund is due under section 5 or section 10.
13. Complaints from other people
If a person tells us that you recorded them or enrolled their voiceprint without consent, we will pass the complaint to you. If you do not resolve it within 10 business days, or if the complaint appears well founded and delay could harm that person, we may delete the affected recording, transcript or voiceprint after notifying you. Where the law requires it, we may give your account contact details to the complainant or to the Information Regulator so that they can pursue the matter with you as the responsible party.
14. Law, changes and contact
South African law governs these terms, and South African courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer, you may also refer a dispute to the National Consumer Commission or a consumer court. Nothing in these terms takes away a right the Consumer Protection Act or POPIA gives you.
We may update these terms. If a change matters to you, we will email you at least 14 days before it takes effect. Continuing to use Tymbr after that date means you accept the new terms. If you do not, close your account before that date and we will refund unused credit.
Questions about these terms: hello@tymbr.dev, or write to Gareth Saul trading as 20 East, 18 Lyndhurst Road, Kenilworth, Cape Town, 7708.