Gifts Policy

1. A marker and a gift are two things

Almost every question we get about money comes from these being confused, so they are separated here first.

• A marker is bought from Macad. It unlocks colours, size, word count and prominence for your signature. It is a product we sell, like a pen you buy on the way to a party. Some or all of its price is our revenue, depending on the rate in force.
• A gift is money for the graduate. It is optional, it is separate from the marker price, and it is what most people actually mean when they say they "dropped a Macad".

You will see both figures separately at checkout, along with the total you are paying and the amount reaching the graduate.

2. This is gifting, not fundraising

Macad is for celebrating someone, not for raising money towards a target. Pages do not carry public fundraising goals, progress bars, or appeals for a cause.

This is deliberate. A public target turns a celebration into a campaign, invites pressure on people who cannot afford to give, and takes the product somewhere it is not licensed or designed to go. Nobody is under any obligation to gift anything, and a graduate who receives nothing has lost nothing they were owed.

Do not use a Macad page to raise money for medical bills, school fees, a business, a charity or an emergency. Those are real needs and there are proper platforms for them. Pages doing it will be taken down.

3. Gifts are not refundable

A gift is a transfer of money from you to another person, made deliberately. Treating it as returnable would mean money already paid to a graduate, money they may have spent, could be pulled back out of their account weeks later. That is not a risk a student should carry for a decision you made.

This is shown to you before you pay, and you confirm it at checkout.

There are two exceptions, and both are about the payment rather than the gift: if you were charged more than once for the same gift, or if you were charged and the gift never appeared on the page. Both are in section 8.

4. When we do refund a marker

A marker is a product we sell you, so ordinary consumer expectations apply. We will refund the marker price if:

• you paid and the signature never appeared on the page;
• you were charged for a marker tier other than the one you chose, or charged twice for the same one;
• a fault on our side stopped the marker doing what its description said it would.

We will not refund a marker because the graduate later hid your signature, or because you changed your mind about how it looks. See section 11.

Email support@usemacad.com with the reference from your receipt, within 30 days.

5. How the money splits

Every payment is split at the moment it is taken:

• the marker price goes to Macad, in whole or in part;
• the gift goes to the graduate, less our share of gifts, which is shown to you before you pay;
• payment processing fees are borne so that the naira figure quoted to you as reaching the graduate is the figure that actually reaches them, not an estimate before fees.

Our share is what keeps the service running. Creating a page and signing one are both free, so markers and the gift share are the only money Macad takes: they pay for processing the payment, for the hosting and storage that hold every signature and message until reveal day and beyond it, for the identity checks required before a graduate can be paid, and for the people who answer when something goes wrong. Macad is not funded by advertising and does not sell personal data.

We can change these rates, but never retrospectively. Every payment records the rate it was taken under, so a rate change cannot alter a payment that has already happened or a graduate's earnings history.

The current rates are always visible at checkout. If you want them in writing before you pay, email support@usemacad.com.

6. When the graduate gets it

1. You pay. The signature appears on the shirt within seconds.
2. The graduate is notified, with your name, your message and the amount, usually within a minute.
3. The gift shows on their balance immediately, marked as not yet available.
4. After a short holding period (currently 48 hours) it becomes available to withdraw.
5. They withdraw to their own verified bank account. We aim to send it within one business day of approving the withdrawal.

The holding period exists because a card payment can be reversed by the payer's bank after it has appeared to succeed. Without it, a reversal after the graduate had withdrawn would leave a student owing money they had already spent.

A graduate can receive gifts before setting up payouts. The money is held and is theirs; they simply cannot withdraw it until their bank details and identity are confirmed. We tell them this clearly rather than letting them find out at the end.

7. Chargebacks and reversals

If you dispute a payment with your bank, the bank may reverse it. When that happens we reverse the gift on our side too, which removes it from the graduate's balance.

Please talk to us before disputing. A chargeback takes money from a student, is investigated as fraud on their page, and can put a hold on their other earnings while it is looked at. If something has genuinely gone wrong, email support@usemacad.com. We can usually fix it faster than a bank can.

Repeated chargebacks from the same payer, or a pattern of gifting followed by disputes, will result in that payer being blocked.

8. Failed and duplicate payments

A payment that fails is not a payment. If your card is declined, nothing is taken and no signature is recorded. Your message and signature are kept so you can try again (by transfer, for example) without typing it out again.

If you were charged but nothing appeared, the money has not vanished. Payments and page updates occasionally arrive out of order. Give it a few minutes, then email us the reference from your bank. We will either complete the gift or refund it in full.

If you were charged twice for the same gift, we refund the duplicate in full. That is not a change of mind and section 3 does not apply.

Refunds go back to the account you paid from and typically take 5–10 business days, depending on your bank.

9. Limits

There is a minimum gift, shown at checkout. There are also upper limits per payment and per payer over a period. These exist to catch stolen cards and money being cycled, not to stop generosity.

If a large gift is held for a check, we will say so on screen rather than failing silently, and we will resolve it as quickly as we can. If you are planning something unusually large (a family collecting together, for instance) email us first and we will make sure it goes through cleanly.

10. Anonymous gifts

You can hide your name from the shirt and from the public roll. It is anonymous to other visitors, and to the graduate if you choose that.

It is not anonymous to us. We keep your payment record and your contact details for the receipt, for fraud checks, and because the law requires us to know who sent money through our platform. We will not publish them, and we will not hand them to the graduate.

Anonymity is not cover for abuse. An anonymous message that breaks the Community Guidelines is removed, and we can identify who sent it.

11. If the graduate hides your signature

A graduate can hide any signature on their page, at any time, without giving a reason. It disappears from public view and is left out of their reveal export.

Your gift still reaches them, and neither the gift nor the marker is refunded. We have thought about this and we are comfortable with it: the page is their keepsake, and a graduate who cannot remove something upsetting from their own shirt does not really have one. Paying does not buy a permanent right to appear on someone else's page.

If you believe a graduate is hiding signatures to collect money while silencing people, tell us. That is a different thing and we will look at it.

12. What gifting must not be used for

Gifts on Macad must not be used to:

• move money for someone else: sending funds through a page to get them somewhere else;
• gift yourself, directly or through someone acting for you, to make a page look active or to unlock an ambassador reward;
• pay for goods, services, tuition, rent or a debt;
• send money you did not come by lawfully, or that is not yours to send;
• pressure, coerce or harass the recipient.

We monitor for these patterns. Where we find them we hold the money, close the page, and report the matter where we are required to.

13. Tax

We are not your tax adviser and this is not tax advice. Genuine personal gifts are generally not treated as taxable income in Nigeria, but your circumstances are yours.

Your dashboard shows every gift, our share, fees and settlement dates, and you can export it. If you need it in another format for an accountant, ask us.

14. If something goes wrong

Email support@usemacad.com. Put the payment reference in the subject line (it is on your receipt, and on the graduate's dashboard) and tell us what you expected to happen.

Anything involving money is acknowledged within two business days and we aim to resolve it within fifteen. If we cannot, we will tell you where you stand rather than leaving it open.

This policy sits alongside the Terms of Service. Where the two differ on money, this one applies.