Skip to content

Legal

Terms of Service

The agreement between Laces and the people who use it: organizers who sell event entries, and participants who buy them. Covers accounts, entries, the fees charged at checkout, waivers, and what happens when an event changes.

Last updated 17 August 2026 · Laces · 9 min read

Keep a copy of this document

A formatted PDF with a cover page, page numbers and the date you retrieved it.

These Terms govern your use of Laces. Laces is a platform for selling and managing entries to running events. Read them before you create an event or buy an entry.

Laces is a product of Apta Innovations Limited, a private company limited by shares, incorporated in the Republic of Uganda on 10 July 2026 under the Companies Act 2012.
Registered company Apta Innovations Limited
Company registration 80045435006790
Registered office Kyanja, Kisaasi Central A, Nakawa Division, Kampala, Central, Uganda
Registered postal P.O. Box 209717, Kampala GPO, Uganda
Trading as Laces (laces.run)
  • “Laces,” “we,” “us” means Apta Innovations Limited, the operator of laces.run and its associated apps and APIs.
  • “Organizer” means the person or organisation that creates an event on Laces and sells entries to it.
  • “Participant” means the person who is registered to take part in an event, whether they bought the entry themselves or someone bought it for them.
  • “Buyer” means whoever pays for an order. A buyer and a participant are often the same person, but not always: a company may buy fifty entries for its staff.
  • “Event” means one edition of a race listed on Laces.
  • “Entry” means the right of a named participant to take part in an event, together with anything included with it such as a race kit.

1. What Laces is, and what it is not

Laces provides the software that organizers use to publish an event, sell entries, collect payment, and run kit collection on race week.

Laces does not organise, host, or run any event. The organizer does. The organizer sets the route, the date, the distances, the prices, the entry conditions, the refund policy, and every other term of participation. The organizer is responsible for the safety, permits, insurance, medical cover, marshalling and conduct of their event.

Your contract to take part in an event is with the organizer. Your contract to use the Laces platform is with us. These are different agreements and this document only covers the second.

Where Laces collects payment from a buyer, it does so on the organizer’s behalf, and holds those funds until they are settled to the organizer under the Organizer Terms.

2. Accepting these Terms

You accept these Terms when you create a Laces account, publish an event, or buy an entry. If you are accepting on behalf of an organisation, you confirm you are authorised to bind it.

If you do not accept these Terms, do not use Laces.

3. Eligibility and accounts

  • You must be at least 18 to hold a Laces organizer account.
  • A participant under 18 may be registered, but a parent or legal guardian must complete the registration, provide their own contact details, and accept the event waiver on the minor’s behalf.
  • Keep your account credentials to yourself. You are responsible for activity under your account until you tell us it has been compromised.
  • Organizer accounts sign in with email and password. Withdrawing money additionally requires a one-time code sent to the account’s email address and bound to that specific amount and destination.
  • Volunteers are given scoped, short-lived access to a single event and, where the organizer sets it, a single collection station. Volunteers never see revenue figures.

4. Buying an entry

4.1 The order

When you pay for an entry, you are buying a place in that specific event, on the terms the organizer has published on the event page. Those terms (the distances, the cut-off times, the entry conditions and the event’s own refund policy) are part of your purchase.

An entry is issued to a named participant. You may be asked for the participant’s name, phone number, emergency contact, and any information the organizer needs to run the event safely.

4.2 What you pay

The event page and the checkout show the full amount before you confirm anything. The total is made up of:

Line What it is
Entry The organizer’s price for the distance or package
Add-ons Extra kit, merchandise, or a donation, if you chose any
Laces Service Fee UGX 500 + 2.9% of the order total. What Laces earns, including the cost of processing your payment. Effective 2026-09-10

Nothing is added after this. There is no charge at the kit tent and no charge on race day for anything already paid for.

The Laces Service Fee is charged to the buyer at checkout, not to the organizer. Laces is free for organizers to use.

4.3 Holding your place

Adding entries to a cart holds that inventory for a short window, currently 15 minutes, so that two people cannot pay for the last remaining place. If you do not complete payment in that window the hold is released and the places go back on sale.

4.4 Payment

Payment is by mobile money. You will receive a prompt on your phone and must enter your Mobile Money PIN to authorise it. Nothing is taken from your account until you enter your PIN.

If a prompt times out or fails, no money has moved. You can retry against the same order without creating a duplicate.

If you are ever charged twice for one order, tell us and we will refund the duplicate. Every payment attempt carries an idempotency key precisely so this should not happen.

4.5 Your ticket

On successful payment you get an order code, shown on screen immediately, and a confirmation with a QR code. Write the order code down. You can look up your order at any time at laces.run/o/{order_code}.

You do not need a smartphone, an email address, or the internet to collect your kit. The order code and an ID are enough.

5. Waivers and your own safety

Most organizers require you to accept a waiver before you can register. The waiver is the organizer’s document, not ours. We record which version you accepted and when, and we make that record available to the organizer.

The electronic record and the organizer’s own requirements. Uganda’s Electronic Transactions Act 2011 gives an electronic record and an electronic signature the same legal effect as their paper equivalents, and the acceptance Laces records (the waiver version, the timestamp, and the originating IP address) is kept as that record and made available to the organizer.

This does not displace the organizer’s judgement. An organizer whose insurer, permit, or governing body requires a handwritten signature must still collect one, and they remain free to require a signature at kit collection in addition to the electronic acceptance. Where the two conflict, the organizer’s stated requirement governs their event.

Running is a physical activity with real risks. You are responsible for judging whether you are fit to take part. Neither Laces nor, generally, the organizer, can assess that for you.

6. Changes, postponement and cancellation

Events change. When they do:

  • The organizer decides whether to refund, transfer, or credit entries, in line with the refund policy published on their event page.
  • If the organizer cancels the event, participants are entitled to a refund in line with that published policy. How that refund is funded, and what Laces does if the organizer has already been settled, is set out in section 6 of the Organizer Terms and in the Refund Policy.
  • Laces will not simply keep participants’ money because an organizer has become unreachable. The settlement timing and reserve described in the Organizer Terms exist to make that outcome avoidable.

7. Refunds

The Refund Policy forms part of these Terms. In short:

  • The organizer’s per-event refund policy governs whether an entry is refundable. Every organizer must publish one before their event can go live, and it appears on the event page.
  • The Laces platform refund policy governs how a refund is processed once it is due: the mechanics, the timing and the channel.

These are two different documents doing two different jobs. Read both.

8. Organizers

If you publish an event on Laces, the Organizer Terms apply to you in addition to this document. They cover settlement timing, the rolling reserve, refund exposure on a cancelled event, KYC, and payouts.

In summary, and without limiting that document, you agree that:

  • The event is yours. You are responsible for permits, insurance, medical cover, route safety, and everything else about actually running it.
  • You will publish a refund policy before you go on sale. Laces will not let you publish without one.
  • You will honour the entries you sell, and the terms you published when you sold them.
  • The information you publish about your event will be accurate.
  • You will handle participant data only for the purposes of running your event, in line with the Privacy Policy and Uganda’s Data Protection and Privacy Act 2019.

9. What you may not do

Do not use Laces to:

  • Sell entries to an event you are not authorised to run.
  • List an event that does not exist, or that you do not intend to hold.
  • Impersonate another organizer, race, or brand.
  • Collect participant data for any purpose other than running the event it was collected for, including marketing unrelated products.
  • Circumvent, disable, or interfere with the platform’s security, rate limiting or payment controls.
  • Scrape the platform, or use it to build a competing database of participants.
  • Break Ugandan law, or the law of anywhere else you are operating.

We may suspend or remove an account or an event that does any of these, and where money is involved we may withhold settlement while we investigate.

10. Your content

Organizers upload event descriptions, photographs, route files, logos, posters and FAQ text. That material stays yours. You grant Laces a licence to host, display, reproduce and distribute it for the purpose of running the platform and promoting your event on it.

You confirm you have the right to upload what you upload. Photographs of participants, in particular, are your responsibility to have cleared.

11. Availability

We work to keep Laces available, particularly during registration windows and on race week, but we do not promise uninterrupted service.

Kit collection is designed to work offline for exactly this reason: the scanner in the Admin App verifies a QR without a network connection and syncs when it gets one. An organizer whose kit tent has no signal can still run their collection.

12. Liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law:

  • Laces is not liable for anything that happens at an event. That is between you and the organizer.
  • Laces is not liable for an organizer’s failure to hold an event, to honour an entry, or to issue a refund the organizer owes.
  • Laces’ total liability to any user, for any claim arising out of the use of the platform, is limited to the total Laces Service Fees actually received in respect of the orders that claim relates to.

We are also not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential loss, including lost profit, lost revenue, or lost opportunity, arising from your use of or inability to use the platform.

Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited or excluded under the laws of Uganda. If any part of this section is found unenforceable, the rest continues to apply and the unenforceable part is limited to the minimum extent necessary.

12.1 Disclaimer of warranties

The platform is provided “as is” and “as available.” To the fullest extent permitted by law we exclude all implied warranties, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement.

We do not warrant that the platform will be uninterrupted or error-free, and we do not warrant anything about an event itself: that it will be held, that it will be held as advertised, or that an organizer will honour what they sold. Those are the organizer’s undertakings, not ours.

13. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms. Where a change materially affects your rights we will give notice by email to the address on your account, and where the change affects an event that is already on sale we will not apply it retrospectively to entries already bought.

The date at the top of this page is the last update.

14. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Republic of Uganda, and the courts of Uganda have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

Talk to us first. Before either of us starts proceedings, the party raising the dispute will put it in writing to the other and both will attempt to resolve it in good faith for 30 days from that notice. Most disputes on a platform like this are a refund, a settlement figure, or a misread policy, and they are resolved faster by a person reading the ledger than by a court.

If 30 days pass without resolution, either party may refer the dispute to mediation under the Judicature (Mediation) Rules, or proceed to the courts of Uganda. Nothing in this section prevents either party from seeking urgent injunctive relief at any time, and nothing in it limits a participant’s right to complain to a regulator, including the Personal Data Protection Office.

15. Third-party services

Running Laces requires services we do not operate. Using Laces means your data is processed by these providers under their own terms:

Provider What it does for Laces Their policy
Eversend Collecting payments and sending payouts Terms · Privacy
Google Cloud / Firebase Database, authentication, file storage, application hosting Firebase privacy · Google privacy
Netlify Hosting and serving laces.run Privacy
Cloudflare Turnstile bot protection at checkout Turnstile privacy
Resend Sending receipts and transactional email Privacy

The Privacy Policy sets out what each one receives.

16. Termination and account deletion

You may close your Laces account at any time from the app. Closing it archives your account and starts a 30-day grace period, after which your sign-in, your user record and your organisation memberships are permanently deleted.

Some records survive account closure, and it is fairer to say so than to discover it later:

  • Orders, payments and ledger entries are retained. They are financial records, we are required to keep them, and they are also a participant’s proof of purchase.
  • An event already on sale must be seen through or cancelled with participants refunded under the Organizer Terms. Closing an account does not discharge what you owe your participants.

We may suspend or terminate an account for a breach of section 9, and immediately where there is fraud or a risk to participants’ money.

17. Chargebacks and payment disputes

If you believe a charge is wrong, contact us before raising a dispute with your bank or mobile-money provider. We can usually see what happened in the ledger and refund it the same day; a formal dispute takes weeks and locks the funds while it runs.

Where a chargeback is raised against an order, we may withhold the disputed amount from the organizer’s settlement until it is resolved, under section 12 of the Organizer Terms.

18. Contact

Apta Innovations Limited (trading as Laces) Company registration 80045435006790