Terms of Service

1. Who these terms are between

The Service is operated by Designnest Technologies Limited, a company registered in Nigeria with registration number RC 8205707, whose registered office is at 12 Zone 6, Oteyi Garden Estate, Abule Ado, Lagos, Nigeria. It trades as Certifications.ng. In these terms we, us and the Company mean that company.

You means the organisation using the Service to issue credentials, and any individual who signs in on its behalf. If you are signing in on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to accept these terms for it.

By buying credits or issuing a credential you accept these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service.

2. Interpretation and definitions

Words with an initial capital have the meanings below, in the singular and the plural alike. They are the same terms used in our Privacy Policy.

• Account — a sign-in created for a named person at an Issuer. Accounts are created by us on request; there is no public sign-up.
• Award — the definition of a credential an Issuer grants: its name, criteria, artwork and signing arrangements. Awards are set up by us, not by an Issuer. See section 4.
• Credential — one certificate or badge issued to one Recipient under an Award, together with its verification page.
• Credit — the prepaid unit that entitles an Issuer to issue one Credential. See section 6.
• Issuer — an organisation that awards Credentials through the Service. Where these terms say you, they mean the Issuer.
• Recipient — an individual named on a Credential. A Recipient has no Account, does not sign in, and is not a party to these terms. See section 12.
• Service — the Website, the credential pages it hosts, the issuer portal, and the emails sent about a Credential.
• Website — Certifications.ng, at https://www.certifications.ng.

3. The two kinds of people these terms cover

This agreement is between us and an Issuer. It is worth being explicit about that, because most people who encounter the Service are not Issuers.

A Recipient did not agree to anything. Their name and email address reached us because an Issuer sent them, and they receive a Credential they did not sign a contract for. Nothing in these terms imposes an obligation on a Recipient, and nothing in them takes away a right a Recipient has under data protection law. Where a Recipient is affected by a clause here, the clause says so.

A verifier — an employer, a registrar, anyone checking a credential they have been handed — is not a party either. They may use the verification page without an Account and without agreeing to anything.

4. What the Service does, and what it does not do

The Service produces signed digital credentials. For each Credential we render a certificate or badge from your Award artwork, sign it with your organisation’s private key, publish a verification page for it, and send the Recipient an email announcing it.

Four limits are part of the agreement rather than footnotes to it, because each one is a thing a buyer may assume is included.

• You cannot create an Award yourself. Criteria, artwork, layout and signing keys are set up by us, following a conversation. The portal has a request form for this. Once an Award exists you may issue under it as often as you like without asking us.
• We send the Recipient mailing. You choose when it goes out; the sending is ours.
• We cannot revoke a Credential. There is no mechanism to mark an issued Credential invalid or withdrawn. If a Credential should not have been issued, the options are to remove it from search results, which does not affect anyone holding the link, or to delete it entirely. Ask us and we will do either.
• We do not issue Open Badges. Credentials are not Open Badges and are not portable to an Open Badges backpack. If you have an accreditation requirement for that standard, this Service does not meet it.

We assure the integrity of the record — that your organisation issued this Credential, to this person, on this date, and that the file has not been altered since. We do not assess, and make no statement about, the merit or rigour of the assessment behind it. That remains yours.

5. Accounts

We create Accounts on request. There is no public sign-up and no self-serve password reset; ask us and we will help. You are responsible for keeping sign-in details confidential and for what is done through an Account you control. Tell us promptly if you think an Account has been compromised.

An Account belongs to one organisation. Someone who administers two Issuers needs two Accounts under two email addresses.

Accounts carry one of two roles. A manager may issue Credentials, buy Credits and change organisation settings. A viewer may read but not write.

6. Credits

One Credit issues one Credential. A certificate and a badge cost the same. Credits are bought in advance and held as a balance against your organisation.

When you issue a batch, one Credit is deducted for each Credential actually created. If a recipient in your list is a duplicate of another in the same list, or already holds the Award you are issuing, no Credential is created for them and no Credit is deducted.

If your balance is lower than the batch requires, nothing is issued. The whole batch is refused rather than issued in part, and no Credits are deducted. You will be told how many the batch needed and how many you hold.

Credits have no cash value, cannot be transferred between organisations, and cannot be exchanged for anything other than the issuance of Credentials.

7. Price and payment

A Credit costs ₦1,000, plus VAT. The minimum purchase is 50 Credits.

All prices are in Nigerian Naira. VAT is charged at the rate in force on the day you buy. At today’s rate that is ₦75 on a Credit, making a Credit ₦1,075 and the minimum purchase ₦53,750. If the rate changes these figures change with it — the amount shown at checkout is always the amount you pay.

Payments are taken by our payment provider. We do not receive or store your card details. Credits are added to your balance once the payment is confirmed by the provider, which is usually immediate.

We may change the price of a Credit. A change never affects Credits you have already bought, and we will publish it before it takes effect.

8. Credits expire after five years

A Credit expires five years after the day it is bought. An expired Credit cannot be used and is not refundable.

A Credit’s expiry date is the date of the purchase plus five years. Where you hold Credits bought at different times, the rule is that the oldest are treated as used first.

9. Credits are not refundable

Credits are sold on a non-refundable basis. We do not refund unused Credits, Credits that have expired, or Credits spent on Credentials you later decide you did not want.

There is one exception, and it is in your favour: section 10.

This section does not affect any right you have under Nigerian law that cannot be excluded by agreement.

10. If we cannot produce a Credential

Issuing a Credential creates the record first; the certificate file, the signature and the published page follow shortly afterwards. Occasionally that second step cannot be completed — for example if an Award’s artwork becomes unavailable, or its signing key is not in place.

Where a Credential cannot be produced, we restore the Credit to your balance. We would rather not publish a Credential at all than publish one that is unsigned or incomplete, because an unsigned credential looks correct and does not verify.

Restoring a Credit does not extend its life: it remains subject to the expiry that applied to the Credit originally spent.

11. Your obligations as an Issuer

You confirm, each time you issue, that:

• the people named have actually earned the Award, and you are entitled to award it;
• the names and email addresses you submit are accurate, and you have a lawful basis for giving them to us so that we can produce and send the Credential;
• you have told those people, or will tell them, that they are receiving a credential and that its verification page is publicly reachable by anyone holding the link;
• the Award artwork and any logo or mark in it is yours to use, or you have permission to use it.

You remain responsible for what a Credential says. The review screen shows exactly what will be signed before you commit a batch, and once a Credential is signed, changing it means issuing a new one (section 14).

12. Recipients

A Recipient may view, download and share their Credential, and may ask us to remove it from search results or delete it. We will act on such a request without requiring the Issuer’s agreement.

A Recipient cannot ask us to change what a Credential says. Only the Issuer can do that, because only the Issuer knows whether it is correct.

What we hold about a Recipient, and how a Recipient’s email address travels with a Credential, is set out in our Privacy Policy.

13. How long a Credential stays verifiable

While your Account is open, Credentials you have issued remain online and verifiable. This does not depend on your Credit balance, on whether you have bought anything recently, or on whether you issue again.

If your Account is closed, Credentials issued before it closed remain online and verifiable for at least five years from the date of closure. During that period they behave exactly as they did before: the same addresses, the same files, the same verification.

We commit to that period because the people relying on a Credential are mostly not you. A Recipient may have put the link on a CV and an employer may check it years later, and neither of them was party to your decision to stop using the Service.

Five years is a minimum, not a deadline. Nothing obliges us to remove a Credential at the end of it, and today we remove nothing at all unless we are asked to — our privacy policy says the same, and it forms part of this agreement. What the five years give you is a commitment you can hold us to rather than a practice that could change. If you need certainty beyond that period, ask us before the five years are up.

14. Corrections

If a Credential is wrong, report it from your portal and we will correct it. A correction is not something you perform yourself: you tell us what it should say, and we regenerate and re-sign the Credential.

The same Credential is corrected in place. It keeps its verification address, so links already shared, printed copies and posts on social networks all keep working. The files are redrawn and the signature is recreated, because a signed file that was edited would no longer match the record — which is the point of signing it.

A recipient’s name is stored once, so correcting a spelling corrects every Credential that person holds rather than one at a time.

Corrections do not cost a Credit, whether the error was ours or in the data you submitted. What a correction cannot reach is a copy already downloaded or printed; the verification page is the record, and it will be right.

15. Acceptable use

You must not use the Service to:

• issue a credential for an award that was not earned, or that your organisation is not entitled to grant;
• impersonate another organisation, or use a name, logo or accreditation mark you have no right to use;
• submit personal data you have no lawful basis to submit, or submit a recipient list obtained from somewhere you may not use it;
• attempt to access another organisation’s data, interfere with the Service, or test its security without our written agreement;
• use the Service to send unsolicited mail of any kind.

Issuing credentials that misrepresent a qualification is the specific harm this platform exists to make harder. We take it seriously and will act on it.

16. Intellectual property

The Website, the software and the design of the Service belong to us. You may not copy, resell or reverse engineer them.

Your name, logo, Award artwork and the content of your Awards remain yours. You give us permission to use them only so far as is needed to produce, sign, publish and deliver your Credentials, and to keep those Credentials verifiable for as long as section 13 requires.

We will not use your name or logo as a customer reference, in marketing, or in a case study without asking you first.

17. Suspension, closure and what survives

You may close your Account at any time by telling us. We may suspend or close an Account if these terms are seriously or repeatedly breached, in particular section 15.

On closure: unused Credits are lost and are not refunded (section 9), and Credentials already issued remain verifiable under section 13. Closing an Account does not withdraw Credentials, because withdrawing them is not something we can do (section 4) and because a Recipient’s credential is not collateral for their issuer’s account.

Sections 13, 16, 19, 20, 21 and 23 survive the end of this agreement.

18. Changes and interruptions to the Service

We may change, add to or remove parts of the Service. Where a change removes something you rely on, we will tell you in advance.

The Service may be unavailable from time to time, for maintenance or for reasons outside our control. We do not guarantee uninterrupted availability, and we are not liable for an interruption — but section 13 is a commitment about Credentials remaining verifiable, and an outage does not reduce it.

19. Disclaimer

The Service is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we exclude implied warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the Service will be uninterrupted or error-free, nor that a third party — an employer, a registry, a social network — will accept a Credential. We can show that a Credential is authentic; we cannot make anyone rely on it.

20. Limitation of liability

To the extent the law allows, our total liability to you for any claim arising out of or relating to these terms or the Service is limited to the amounts you paid us in the six months before the event giving rise to the claim.

We are not liable for loss of profit, loss of business, loss of goodwill, or indirect or consequential loss.

Nothing in these terms excludes liability for fraud, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded.

21. Indemnity

You will indemnify us against claims, losses and reasonable costs arising from your breach of section 11 or section 15 — in particular a claim that a Credential you issued misrepresents a qualification, or that you had no right to submit the personal data behind it.

22. Privacy

Our Privacy Policy describes what personal data we hold, who it is shared with, how long it is kept, and what you and a Recipient can ask us to do about it. It forms part of this agreement.

For the personal data of Recipients, you are the controller and we process it on your instructions in order to produce, sign, host and deliver Credentials.

23. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and the courts of Nigeria have jurisdiction.

If something goes wrong, contact us first. We will try to resolve it informally within 30 days, and most things are resolved that way. If they are not, either of us may take the matter to the courts of Lagos State.

24. Changes to these terms

We may change these terms. The date at the top of this page tells you when they last changed.

Where a change materially affects you — the price of a Credit, the expiry period, or section 13 — we will tell Account holders before it takes effect, and it will not apply retrospectively to Credits already bought or Credentials already issued.

25. Contact us

Designnest Technologies Limited, trading as Certifications.ng. RC 8205707.
Registered office: 12 Zone 6, Oteyi Garden Estate, Abule Ado, Lagos, Nigeria.

Email charles@certifications.ng. For anything about a specific Credential, include its verification address.

The registered office is given because a contract needs an identifiable party and a procurement reviewer looks for one. It is not a support channel — email reaches us, post does not.