Terms of use

1. What you are accepting

These terms are an agreement between you and the owner of the AruGo service (the app and the site arun.kz). You accept them when you sign in to the app with your phone number. If you disagree with anything written here, do not use the service; we cannot think of another way for you to express disagreement.

The Privacy policy, which describes what happens to your data, applies together with this document.

2. What AruGo is and what it is not

So that no ambiguity is left, plainly. AruGo is not:

• not a carrier — we do not drive anyone anywhere and we do not organise carriage;
• not an employer of drivers — we conclude neither employment nor civil-law contracts for carriage with them, we pay no wages, assign no shifts and issue no routes;
• not a dispatch office — there is no living person handing out orders, neither here nor in the village. The queue hands them out, and it works by itself;
• not an aggregator in the usual sense — we have no cashless payment, no saved cards and no commission on trips;
• not a navigator — the driver builds the route in his own maps app;
• not a messenger — there is no chat inside the app; where necessary the parties call each other directly.

We write this not in order to shrug everything off. Taxis already work in the village, and work well: the drivers know one another, keep a queue by spoken agreement and carry people for understandable money. We are not replacing that system with ourselves — we are removing the phone calls, the chat-watching and the announcements of your trip to the whole village. Everything else stays as it was, including who is answerable for what.

3. Drivers are not our staff, documents are not checked

This is deliberate. Checking documents at a distance is either a formality (a photo of a licence confirms nothing) or an apparatus that a service of this size does not have. Staging a check that does not exist is more dangerous than saying honestly that there is none: a passenger would start relying on a guarantee that is not there.

The bet is on something else: in a village everyone knows everyone, and reputation works harder here than paper. You ride with the same person you would have called directly.

What follows from this for a passenger:

• the fact that a driver is in the app does not mean that we vouch for him, that we have checked him or that we recommend him;
• the decision to get into a particular car is yours;
• if something happens during the trip, you should turn to the police, the ambulance service and the driver’s insurer — exactly as you would had you arranged the ride with him without any app.

What follows from this for a driver:

• you carry people in your own name and at your own risk;
• complying with the requirements of the legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan on the carriage of passengers, holding a licence, keeping the car roadworthy, insurance and paying tax on your income are your obligations, not ours;
• we do not keep your accounts, do not issue receipts and are not your tax agent;
• neither we owe you working hours nor you owe them to us: on the line you get orders, off the line you do not, and no explanation is required.

4. Payment goes straight to the driver

The platform therefore has no card processing, no saved cards, no holding of funds and no refunds. We can neither charge you nor return money to you — we have no means to. All settlement, including change, a receipt and any argument about the amount, is between the passenger and the driver.

Using the app is currently free for both passengers and drivers. For passengers it will remain free always. If a charge for drivers ever appears, it will be a fixed amount for access to the line, announced in advance and with a trial period — but never a percentage of the trip.

5. How the price is calculated

The price is calculated from the fare of the particular village: by zones and directions, separately for day and night. We do not invent the fare — it is written down from the village’s own words, with the same figures the drivers already use.

• The price is shown before the order is confirmed and does not change after the trip.
• The passenger may raise the price in order to leave sooner. The increase is capped, so that the queue does not turn into an auction.
• The price cannot be dropped below the fare.
• The driver accepts the order already seeing the final amount.
• If the passenger is far from the village, a charge for the empty approach is added to the price. Beyond a set limit the order is not created at all.

The price in the app is the price of the trip agreed in advance between the parties. The driver is not entitled to demand more than that when the trip is over; haggling after the trip is exactly what the app removes.

6. The queue and how orders are handed out

Orders are handed out by the village queue, not to whoever wrote in the chat fastest. The rules are the same for everyone and are not tuned in anybody’s favour, neither by drivers nor by us:

• the order is first offered privately to the driver at the head of the queue, for 30 seconds;
• if he declines or stays silent, the order goes to every free driver at once, and whoever taps first takes it;
• the driver who took the order goes to the back of the queue once the trip is complete; the places of the others do not move;
• the first decline in a row costs nothing; a second one in a row costs one place in the queue;
• two silent misses in a row temporarily stop orders being sent until the driver confirms that he is there;
• if there are no free cars, the order may be offered to a busy driver as his next one — no more than one order held in reserve;
• a long loss of connection automatically takes the driver off the line.

There is no way to pass an order to “that particular Erzhan” in the app. It is not needed: a decline hands the order to the others within a second anyway, and nobody has to make a call.

There is no guarantee that a car will be found. If nobody in the village is on the line at that moment, or everyone is busy, the order will be left without a driver and the app will say so plainly.

7. Cancellation and the absence of penalties

A passenger may cancel an order or the wait at any moment. There are no penalties, holds or cancellation fees in the service — neither technically nor by the rules.

A driver may give back even an order he has already accepted, if circumstances have changed. The order goes straight to the others and the passenger sees that another car is being looked for — which is better than waiting for someone who will not come. Systematically giving back accepted orders is grounds for the platform to look into it.

8. Rules of conduct

By using the service you agree not to do the following:

• create orders you do not intend to take, or orders for other people without their knowledge;
• register with someone else’s phone number or pass yourself off as another person;
• enter in a driver profile a plate number that is not yours or a car you do not drive;
• use the app to carry things prohibited by law or for acts that break the legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan;
• threaten, insult or harass the other party, or use the contacts from an order for anything other than the trip itself;
• try to get around the queue, automate the taking of orders, or interfere with the working of the app or the server;
• harvest other users’ data from the app.

Separately: the other party’s phone number, which you see with the order, is given for that trip. It may not be used for mailings, advertising or persistent calls.

9. Restriction of access by the platform

We do not vet users in advance — moderation is reactive, driven by complaints. Having received one, we look at the order log: who it was offered to, who took it, when the driver arrived and what the price was. Depending on what we find we may warn, temporarily restrict access or block an account.

We try to explain the reason for a block and not to block on the strength of a single anonymous message. But we do reserve the right to restrict access in the event of a gross or repeated breach of these terms — including without warning where people’s safety is concerned.

If you believe a block is a mistake, write to berkenov.post@gmail.com and we will look into it.

10. Quiet two-way blocks

After a trip either party may mark that they no longer want to deal with that person. The system simply stops putting that pair together in orders.

The other side never finds out: no notification, no mark in the app, no explanation for the absence of orders. We do not ask for the reason and we do not store it. This is a deliberate decision — in a village a public quarrel costs more than the quarrel itself.

The absence of orders from a particular person is not a punishment, does not affect a place in the queue and is not disclosed to anyone. There is more in the Privacy policy.

11. Responsibility of the parties

What the driver is answerable for

For the carriage in full: for the safety of the passenger and of his belongings on the way, for the condition of the car, for observing the traffic rules and the requirements for carrying passengers, and for harm caused during the trip. This is the driver’s responsibility as an independent person, and it does not pass to the platform merely because the order arrived through an app.

What the passenger is answerable for

For the accuracy of the stated pickup and destination points, for paying the agreed amount, for the safety of the driver’s property and for his own conduct in the car.

What the platform is answerable for

For the working of the app itself: that the order reaches drivers, that the queue is counted by the rules described, that the price is calculated from the village fare, and that your data is processed the way the Privacy policy says.

We look into complaints and may restrict an offender’s access as a result — but that is a measure of the platform, not compensation for damage. Compensation for harm caused during a trip is settled between its participants and, where necessary, through the police, an insurance company or a court.

12. Your account and sign-in security

Your account is your phone number. Signing in is confirmed by a code that arrives on WhatsApp.

• Never tell anyone the code from the message. We never call or write asking you to read it out. Whoever asks for the code is signing in to your account.
• Acts performed in your account are treated as performed by you.
• If you have lost your phone or suspect that someone else has signed in to your account, write to us.
• One person may be both a passenger and a driver — that is one account, not two.
• You may delete your account at any moment, right in the app, without explaining why.

13. Changes and discontinuation

The terms may change along with the service. Every edition has a date and a version number, shown at the start of the document. Material changes will be shown in the app before they take effect. By continuing to use the service after that you accept the new edition.

The service is at the pilot stage. We may change the set of features, suspend work in a particular village or stop altogether. In that case we will warn users as far in advance as we can. You owe us nothing, so there will be nothing to refund on closure either.

14. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the legislation of the Republic of Kazakhstan.

We ask that disputes first be settled by correspondence: write to berkenov.post@gmail.com and we will answer on the substance. If no agreement is reached, the dispute is resolved in the courts of the Republic of Kazakhstan in the manner established by law.

If any provision of these terms turns out to be invalid, the rest continue to apply.