Draft, awaiting legal review. This describes how Macad works today and we intend to be held to it, but it has not yet been settled by a Nigerian lawyer. If anything here matters to a decision you're making, email legal@usemacad.com and we'll answer directly.
Macad gives you a page where people sign a virtual shirt and send you money to celebrate. Signing is free. Paying for a marker makes a signature stand out, and a signer can attach a gift on top.
Gifts belong to you, less our share, which is shown on screen before anyone pays. We pass your money to your own bank account. We are not a bank and we do not lend, invest or hold it as savings. Gifts are not refundable, because a gift is not a purchase.
You must be 16 or older and in a tertiary institution. You are responsible for what appears on your page.
This summary is not the agreement. Where it and the sections below disagree, the sections below are what applies.
1. Who we are
Macad ("Macad", "we", "us") operates the website at usemacad.com and the services on it. We are a company registered in Nigeria. Our registered details, including our RC number and registered address, appear on our contact page and on any invoice or statement we issue you.
These terms are an agreement between you and Macad. By creating an account, creating a page, signing someone's shirt, or sending a gift, you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use Macad.
Two other documents form part of this agreement and you should read them: the Privacy Policy, the Gifts Policy and the Community Guidelines. Where the Gifts Policy says something more specific about money than this document does, the Gifts Policy applies.
2. Who can use Macad
To create a Macad page you must:
be at least 16 years old;
be a student at, or a recent graduate of, a tertiary institution: a university, polytechnic, college of education or equivalent;
be creating a page for yourself, using your own name and your own photograph;
be able to receive money into a Nigerian bank account held in your own name.
Secondary school students cannot create a page. We know sign-out happens at secondary school too. Running it properly would mean guardian consent, guardian-held payout accounts and stricter content rules, and we would rather not offer it at all than offer it badly.
To sign a page or send a gift you do not need an account and you do not need to be a student. You do need to be old enough to hold the bank card or account you are paying from.
3. Your account
You are responsible for your account and for anything done through it. Keep your password and any one-time codes to yourself. If you think someone else has got into your account, tell us immediately at support@usemacad.com The sooner you do, the more we can do about money that has already moved.
Give us information that is true and keep it current. This is not a formality: the name on your account is matched against the name on your bank account and against government records before we release money, and a mismatch is the single most common reason a payout is blocked.
One account per person. You may hold more than one page on that account; see the next section.
4. Your Macad page
Your page has a link (your handle), your name and photo, your institution, your course and set, and a reveal date. It goes live as soon as you create it. You can edit it, pause it, or ask us to delete it.
You may hold more than one page: for example a sign-out page and an NYSC passing-out page. There is a limit on how many, shown to you when you reach it. Each page is separate: its own link, its own signatures, its own balance and its own payouts. Money on one page cannot be withdrawn against another.
Verifying your identity is different, and it is done once per person. Once you have verified, every page on your account inherits it. You do not pay for or repeat verification to open a second page.
Handles are first come, first served. We reserve some for the product itself and we may reclaim a handle that impersonates someone, infringes a trademark, or was registered to resell.
Two settings control where your page appears beyond its own link: the public activity feed and the Explore gallery. Both are on by default, both are disclosed when you create your page, and both are switches on your dashboard. They publish different amounts of information and turning one off does not turn off the other.
5. Signing someone's shirt
Anyone with the link can sign, free, without an account. You draw or type a signature, add a short message, and place it on the shirt.
What you write is seen by the graduate and by everyone who opens their page, and it may appear in the image or video they share afterwards. Write accordingly. The Community Guidelines set out what is not allowed.
The graduate can hide any signature on their page, at any time, without giving a reason. A hidden signature disappears from public view and is left out of any export. If you paid for a marker and the graduate hides it, see the Gifts Policy. The short answer is that we will not refund the marker, and we think the graduate should have that control over their own keepsake.
When you sign, you give the graduate and Macad permission to display what you wrote or drew on that page and in exports of it. You keep ownership of it.
6. Markers and gifts
These are two different things and the difference matters:
A marker is something you buy from Macad. It unlocks inks, a larger size, more words, and how prominently your signature sits on the shirt. It is a product, sold by us.
A gift is money you are sending to the graduate. It is optional and separate from the marker price.
At checkout you see the marker price, the gift amount, and exactly how much of the total reaches the graduate, before you pay. If you cannot see that breakdown, do not pay: tell us.
You can pay by card or bank transfer. Card payments may be subject to your bank's own limits and checks. If a payment fails, your message and your signature are kept so you can try again by another method without typing it out a second time.
There is a minimum gift amount, shown at checkout. We do not support cash, cryptocurrency or payment outside the methods offered on the page. Anyone asking you to pay a graduate another way is not doing so through Macad, and we cannot help you if it goes wrong.
7. What we charge
Macad makes money in two ways, and both are disclosed before payment:
We sell markers. The marker price is ours, in whole or in part depending on the rate in force.
We take a share of gifts. The rate is shown at checkout as a naira figure, not only a percentage: "₦8,000 goes to Adaeze" rather than "20% fee".
What that money pays for. Creating a page is free, signing one is free, and there is no subscription, so markers and the share of gifts are the only money Macad takes. They fund running the service: payment processing, the hosting and storage that keep every page, signature and message safe until reveal day and after it, the identity checks the law requires before we can pay a graduate, support when something goes wrong, and the work of building and maintaining the platform. Macad is not funded by advertising, and we do not sell personal data; the Privacy Policy sets out what we do and do not do with it.
We can change these rates. A change applies only to payments made after it takes effect: every order records the rate it was captured under, and we never reprice a payment that has already happened. Your earnings history will not move because we changed a rate.
Payment providers charge their own fees, and banks sometimes charge to receive a transfer. Those are shown to you where we know them and are outside our control where we do not.
8. Your money and getting paid
We are not a bank. We do not take deposits, we do not pay interest, we do not lend your money and we do not invest it. What we do is collect gifts through a licensed Nigerian payment provider and pass your share to your bank account.
Between a gift being paid and you withdrawing it, your share sits with our payment provider and is recorded against your page in our ledger. We publish your balance, what is available now, and what is not yet available, on your dashboard.
Gifts are not available to withdraw immediately. A gift becomes available after a short holding period (currently 48 hours) because a card payment can be reversed by the payer's bank after it appears to have succeeded. Without that window, a reversal after you had already withdrawn would leave you owing money you had spent. The current period is shown on your dashboard.
To withdraw you need a verified identity and a bank account in your own name. There is a minimum withdrawal amount, shown on your dashboard. Withdrawals are sent to the bank account you have set as your default; we do not send money anywhere else, including to an account belonging to a friend, a parent or a class rep.
We aim to send withdrawals within one business day of approving them. Once the money leaves us, how quickly it lands is the banks' business and not ours. If a transfer fails, the amount returns to your available balance and you can try again.
Pausing your page does not touch your money. You can still withdraw while paused. We will never make taking your page down a way of freezing what you are owed.
9. Verifying who you are
Before we release money we check that you are who you say you are. You will be asked for a BVN or NIN and your date of birth, checked against the government database through a licensed verification provider.
We do not store your BVN or NIN. The number goes to the provider and is discarded. We keep only a one-way fingerprint of it, which lets us answer "has this identity been used on another page?" without holding the number itself. This is described in more detail in the Privacy Policy.
We then check that the name on your bank account matches the name the government database returned, not the name you typed, which would be comparing your own answer to itself. If they do not match closely enough, withdrawal is blocked until it is resolved. Your page stays up and gifts keep arriving; it is only the withdrawal that waits.
A close-but-not-exact mismatch (a middle name, a maiden name, a transposition) is common and is resolved by a person looking at it. Email support@usemacad.com.
10. When we hold or freeze money
We may hold a withdrawal, or freeze a page, where we have a reasonable basis to think something is wrong. In practice that means:
a page impersonating someone, or using a photograph or identity that is not the account holder's;
gifting patterns that look like money being cycled rather than given: for example a single payer funding a page repeatedly, or cards that later prove to be stolen;
a chargeback or a bank reversal against gifts on the page;
the same government identity verified across pages belonging to different people;
a credible report that the page or its content breaks these terms or the law.
If we hold your money we will tell you, and we will tell you why in terms specific enough for you to answer. We will not hold a withdrawal indefinitely without explanation. Where a hold turns out to be unwarranted, we release it and the money is yours.
Verifying the same identity across pages you own is expected and is not a hold reason. That is how one person runs a sign-out page and an NYSC page.
11. Content on your page
You keep ownership of your photograph, your words and anything else you upload. You give us permission to host and display it in order to run the service: to show your page, to generate your share images and reveal video, and to show your page in the Explore gallery if you have that switched on. That permission ends when the content is removed, except for copies we must keep for the reasons set out in the Privacy Policy.
Do not upload anything you do not have the right to upload: someone else's photograph, a copyrighted image, a school crest you have no permission to use.
We filter messages for obvious abuse and we act on reports, but we do not read every signature before it appears. What is on your page is substantially in your hands: you can hide anything, and you should. The Community Guidelines say what we remove ourselves.
12. The ambassador programme
Students can apply to represent Macad on their campus. Applying does not entitle you to join; we review applications and we do not have to give a reason for refusing one.
If you are approved:
You get a referral code. It is yours and you must not sell or transfer it.
You earn rewards based on activated pages: pages created with your code that go on to receive at least one paid marker. Pages that are created and never gifted do not count, and we say so up front because it is the difference between the two numbers on your dashboard.
Rewards are goods and recognition, not cash. What each tier requires is shown on your dashboard before you reach it.
Once you have earned a reward that ships, you give us a delivery address. We send it to that address and nowhere else.
You must not create pages yourself to claim your own referrals, pay people to create pages, use anyone else's identity or bank details, or claim to speak for Macad beyond promoting it. Doing any of that ends your place in the programme, and we may withhold rewards not yet sent.
We can change reward tiers, and we can end the programme. A reward you have already earned stays earned; a later change to a threshold does not take it back.
Being an ambassador does not make you our employee, agent or partner, and does not entitle you to a salary.
13. Printing, framing and merch
You can order a printed shirt or a framed keepsake of your signed design. These are fulfilled by third-party printers and couriers. Prices are shown before you order and include delivery within Nigeria unless stated otherwise.
Because each item is made to your design, it cannot be resold, and we cannot accept a change of mind once production has started. If an item arrives damaged, faulty, or materially different from what you ordered, tell us within 14 days of delivery and we will replace it or refund it.
Delivery dates are estimates. We will tell you the courier and tracking number once your item ships.
14. Availability and changes
We try to keep Macad running, but we do not promise it is always available. We may take it down for maintenance, and parts of it depend on other companies (payment providers, banks, messaging services) whose failures we cannot prevent.
We may change these terms. If a change materially affects you, we will tell you before it takes effect, by email or in the product, and the date at the top of this page will change. Continuing to use Macad after that means you accept the new terms. A change never applies retrospectively to a payment already made.
15. Ending this agreement
You can stop using Macad whenever you like. You can pause your page yourself, and you can ask us to delete your account by emailing support@usemacad.com.
Deleting your account does not delete money you are owed. Withdraw your balance first, or tell us where to send it. We will not keep a balance because an account was closed.
We may suspend or close your account if you break these terms, if we are required to, or if keeping it open would expose us or other users to fraud or legal risk. Where we can, we will tell you first. Where we close an account, any money owed to you that is not subject to a hold remains yours.
16. Our responsibility, and its limits
We are responsible for running the service with reasonable care and skill. In particular:
we are responsible for money we have collected and not passed on when it was due;
we are responsible for our own security failures affecting your data.
We are not responsible for:
what other people write on your page, beyond acting on reports;
a payer's decision to send or not send a gift, or the amount; nobody is obliged to gift anything;
delays caused by banks, payment providers or couriers;
money you lose by arranging a payment outside Macad, however the arrangement was described to you.
Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited, including for fraud or for death or personal injury caused by negligence. Subject to that, our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the greater of the amounts we charged you in the twelve months before the claim, and the amount we hold for you that we failed to pay.
17. Complaints and disputes
Start by telling us: support@usemacad.com. We aim to acknowledge a complaint within two business days and to resolve it within fifteen. If it concerns money, say so in the subject line and include the reference from your receipt or dashboard.
If we cannot resolve it between us, these terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and the courts of Nigeria have jurisdiction. Nothing here stops you complaining to a regulator, including the Nigeria Data Protection Commission about how we handle your data.
18. General
If a part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest continues to apply. If we do not enforce something immediately, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
You may not transfer your rights under these terms to someone else. We may transfer ours if our business is sold, and it would not reduce your rights.
These terms, together with the Privacy Policy, the Gifts Policy and the Community Guidelines, are the whole agreement between us about Macad.
