The deal, in plain words.

What Virtual Doorbell is

You print a QR code and put it by your door. A visitor scans it with their own phone and taps once. You get a message on Telegram and can answer from your phone or your laptop, with video and audio or audio only.

What it is not

Virtual Doorbell is a doorbell. It is not a security system.

Do not rely on it to protect people or property, and do not use it as your only way of being reached. It depends on a visitor having a working phone, a camera and mobile data — see the limits below.

Your account

You need a working Telegram account, because that is where a ring is delivered. Keep your sign-in details to yourself. You are responsible for what happens on your account and for the people you invite into your household.

What it costs

There is a free tier you never have to leave, and paid plans if you want a bigger weekly allowance. Prices are in South African Rand.

A "ring" is one visitor scanning your code and tapping once. What each plan allows per week, and what it costs monthly or yearly, is on the pricing page — that is the authoritative version, and it is the only place we state a price.

Card payments are handled by our payment provider. We never see or store your full card number.

Changing your plan, and stopping

You can stop a paid plan yourself, at any time, from the pricing page.

When you stop, your plan runs until the end of the period you have paid for and then drops to the free tier rather than being deleted. Nothing is removed — your doors, your household and your history stay exactly where they are. We do not refund a period that has already started.

Moving to a different plan starts a new period immediately at the new price. It does not carry over or refund whatever is left of the one you are on, and we tell you that before you pay rather than after. Renewing the plan you are already on is the one change that extends your existing end date instead of restarting it.

We may change these prices, but not for a period you have already paid for. If a payment fails we will tell you and your plan keeps running for a short grace period before it drops to free.

Rings, video, and your own limits

Being told somebody is at your door is not rationed. It is the same on every plan, including the free one.

What a paid plan buys is video: how many calls a week you can take with a picture. When those run out, a visitor asking for video is put through as an audio call instead — you are still told, you can still hear and answer them — and everything resets at midnight on Monday morning, South African time. The week runs Monday to Sunday and is a fixed calendar week, not a rolling seven days. The number for each plan is on the pricing page.

Separately, you set your own limits on each door in your dashboard: how many rings an hour, how many in a day, and a daily budget for how many alerts reach your phone. Those are yours, not ours, they stay DAILY whatever your plan says, and they are a rolling twenty-four hours rather than a reset on Monday. When your own alert budget is used up, rings are still recorded and still shown in your dashboard, and we send you one summary instead of a hundred alerts.

A ring that arrives during your quiet hours, or while the doorbell is paused, does not count against any of these — so a siege at 3am cannot use up what you need for the courier at 7am.

What a visitor can leave behind

Three things a visitor can leave are off unless you switch them on, on each door, in your dashboard. If you switch them on, you are the one deciding to hold them, and you are responsible for telling anyone who needs to know.

• A message. Somebody who gets no answer can type a note or record a short voice note. Kept for 30 days, then deleted automatically.
• A photo. One still picture is taken at the moment the bell is pressed. Kept for 7 days, then deleted automatically. It is a single frame, not a recording.
• Messages through a contact QR. If you use a contact code rather than a doorbell code, what people send you is kept for 60 days unless you delete it sooner.

Calls themselves are still never recorded and never saved.

You can delete any of it from your dashboard at any time, and deleting your account removes all of it. What we hold and for how long is set out in full on the privacy page.

Talk time

Virtual Doorbell is for answering a door, not for general calls. A call ends automatically after five minutes. That is long enough to deal with anyone standing at your door and short enough that the service cannot be used as a free phone line. Please also do not try to work around it: an account used that way can be suspended. If we change that number, this page will say so.

Fair use

Do not use Virtual Doorbell to harass anyone, to place calls that are not about answering a door, or to work around the ring limits. Automated hammering of a door is abuse and we will stop it.

The honest limits

A visitor with a flat battery, no airtime or no signal cannot ring at all.

A wired doorbell does not have that problem. We recommend putting a phone number on the plate as a backup. A QR code is also a photograph: anyone who walks past can copy it, which is exactly why quiet hours, a hard ring limit, a separate alert budget and one-tap code replacement exist. Those reduce the damage of a copied code; they do not make copying impossible.

We do not promise the service is never interrupted. It runs on the internet, on a phone we do not control, over a mobile network we do not control.

Ending it

You can delete your account and everything in it from your dashboard, at any time, without asking us. We may suspend an account that is being used abusively.

Liability

Virtual Doorbell is provided as it is. To the extent the law allows, we are not liable for loss arising from a ring that did not arrive, a call that did not connect, or a service interruption. Nothing here removes rights you have under South African law, including the Consumer Protection Act.

Changes and contact

If we change these terms materially we will say so on this page and update the date at the top. Questions, or anything that looks wrong: use the contact form on this site. There is a link to it in the footer of every page and on your dashboard.