Terms of service

Version 2026-09-20 · Last reviewed 2026-09-20

1. Agreeing to these terms

By using this service you accept these terms and our privacy policy. If you do not accept them, do not use the service.

2. What this service is

SAPS publishes an online enquiry page where anyone holding a reference number can check the status of a firearm licence, renewal or competency application. This site performs that same enquiry for you and presents the answer more clearly: it maps the status onto the stages of the process, explains what the current stage means, and tells you what normally happens next.

With an account you can additionally save applications, keep their status history in one place, be told when something changes, and see our approval history list, which shows roughly how far SAPS has worked through the reference numbers around yours. The status checker itself stays open to everyone, with no account and no sign-in.

An account also gives you a private record of your own: a register of the firearms you own and when their licences expire, reminders before those dates, a log of the range visits and hunts that keep a dedicated status alive, and a printable copy of that log. You can also share a card showing an application's progress, with the reference and serial number hidden.

3. What this service is not

We are entirely independent of the South African Police Service and the Central Firearms Register. We are not endorsed by, connected to, or acting on behalf of any government body.

• We cannot influence, speed up, or change your application in any way.
• We are not a substitute for SAPS or your Designated Firearms Officer. Anything official must go through them.
• We do not give legal advice. If you need advice about a refusal, an appeal or your obligations under the Firearms Control Act, speak to a qualified attorney.
• Your register is your own record and nothing more. It is not a licence, not proof of one, and not connected to the Central Firearms Register. What SAPS holds is what counts.
• Renewal reminders are a convenience, not a guarantee. We work them out from the expiry date you type in, so a date entered wrongly produces a reminder at the wrong time, and email and Telegram can both fail to arrive for reasons no website controls. Section 24 of the Firearms Control Act puts the renewal deadline on you, and it stays with you whether or not a reminder from us ever reaches you. Please do not rely on this site as your only way of knowing.
• Your activity log is a record you keep for yourself. Every accredited association takes activity submissions through its own system, and the printable record is something to work from when you do that, not a form any of them accepts in place of it.

4. Accuracy of the information shown

Everything we show about an application comes from SAPS. We do not edit it, and we cannot verify it. If SAPS's own record is wrong, out of date, or missing, that is what you will see here.

Our plain-language explanations and the pipeline view are our interpretation of the process, offered to help you understand where things stand. They are not an official statement of your application's progress. Where our reading of a status is uncertain, we show you the raw status from SAPS rather than guess.

Treat the result as a helpful indication. Before acting on anything important, confirm it with your DFO.

5. Only look up references that are yours

You may use this service only for applications that are your own, or that you are genuinely authorised to enquire about. Using someone else's reference number to look into their affairs is not acceptable here, and depending on the circumstances may also be unlawful.

You also agree not to automate, scrape or bulk-query the website, and not to attempt to discover reference numbers that were not given to you. We rate limit requests and cap each account at 15 saved applications partly to make that impractical. Automated access is available through our API instead, on the terms in section 9, which is the supported way to do this.

6. Your account

• Keep your password to yourself and use one you do not use elsewhere. You are responsible for what happens under your account.
• Give a real email address you control. It is how you verify your account, reset your password, and receive status alerts.
• Tell us at info@isitapproved.co.za if you believe someone else has access to your account.
• You can delete your account yourself at any time from your account page, which removes everything attached to it.

7. Availability

Every part of this service, including the paid API covered in section 9, is provided as-is. We may change, suspend or discontinue any part of it, and we do not promise any particular uptime, response time or availability. We give no service level agreement and no credit for downtime.

We depend on SAPS's own enquiry service. When it is slow, unavailable, or changes the way it responds, we cannot show you a result. When that happens we say so plainly rather than showing you something that might be wrong.

8. Fair use

Do not use the service to break the law, to interfere with its operation or security, to place unreasonable load on it or on SAPS, or to gain access to anything you are not entitled to. We may suspend or remove an account being used this way.

9. Our API

We also offer a paid API for checking references by machine instead of by hand. It is sold as a subscription for a fixed term, paid in advance. Everything above still applies to it; this section covers what is different.

• Each monthly cycle of your subscription carries an allowance of calls. Unused calls do not carry over: they are lost at the end of the cycle they belonged to, and a new cycle starts at that cycle's allowance and nothing more.
• Top-up packs are added to a single cycle. They expire with that cycle, and they never extend your paid term.
• All payments are final, except where the law requires otherwise. We do not refund a subscription, a top-up, an unused allowance, or any remaining part of a paid term, whether you cancel, stop using the service, or close your account.
• Cancelling stops your subscription from renewing. It does not refund paid time, and your access continues until the term you have paid for ends.
• We may change our prices. A change never affects a term you have already paid for.
• You are responsible for keeping your API key secret. We cannot tell your traffic apart from anyone else's who has it.
• You warrant that you hold the data subject's mandate, or another lawful basis, for every reference you submit through the API, and that you are an independent responsible party under POPIA for that processing, separately from us. This is what makes a contracted, identified customer looking up someone else's reference through the API lawful, unlike a stranger doing the same anonymously on the website.
• We may rate limit or suspend API access that is used abusively, the same as section 8 lets us do for the rest of the service.

What we collect and keep when you use the API, and for how long, is set out in our privacy policy.

10. Our motivation letter and renewal motivation

We also sell a motivation letter for a South African firearm licence application: one letter for R250, written by an AI-assisted generator from your own answers and tailored to the section of the Firearms Control Act you are applying under.

We also sell a renewal motivation for one firearm at R180, on the same terms as the letter: an AI-assisted draft written from your answers, three generation attempts, free edits to its wording while it is a draft, and accepting ends both generation and further editing of that wording. It is written as the additional motivation to the sworn Annexure to SAPS 518(a); you swear to that Annexure, so you are responsible for every fact in it being true.

There are three things we will not prepare a renewal motivation for. In the first two the licence has already ended under section 28 of the Firearms Control Act, so there is nothing left to renew; the third was never a licence under that Act:

• A licence that has already expired, which terminates it under section 28(1)(a). We ask for the expiry date on the first screen of the wizard, before you pay, so this refusal almost always reaches you before any money does.
• A licence whose holder has become or been declared unfit to possess a firearm under section 102 or 103, which terminates it under section 28(1)(c). Field D3 of the Annexure asks you this, and so do we. The first screen of the wizard asks it too, before you pay; but field D3 is asked again at a step that comes after payment, so this refusal can reach you once you have already paid. The bullet on that, below, says what happens then.
• A green licence, issued under the Arms and Ammunition Act 75 of 1969. SAPS deals with an application for it as a new application, not a renewal. We name it on the screen where you start a renewal, and ask about it again on the first screen of the wizard, both before you pay.

• An AI model writes the letter, and AI can make mistakes. The wizard asks the questions your section turns on and the letter is generated from the answers you give, but a generated letter can still contain a factual error, a claim your documents do not support, or wording that does not fit your circumstances. Always read the whole letter and check it against your own facts and documents before you sign it or hand it in. We keep a human in the loop on purpose: what we produce is a draft for you to check, never a finished submission, and you are the last check before it reaches a Designated Firearms Officer.
• R250 buys one letter, generated from the answers you give in the wizard, and includes up to three generation attempts on that one application. You can edit the letter's text yourself as many times as you like, at no extra cost, for as long as it is still a draft, and doing so never counts against your attempts.
• What we fix, and when. The applicant your document is written for is fixed by your payment, because one payment buys one applicant's document. What the first screen of the wizard asks you is fixed by your first generated draft, and so is the firearm your document is written for, because your document is argued from them. The screen you pay from names the applicant details this covers. If one of them is wrong, reply to your payment receipt and we will sort out what happens next.
• Accepting a letter ends generation, and fixes its wording. Once you accept a draft, both stop for good: any attempts you have not used are forfeited, even if that means all three, and the letter's text can no longer be edited here. Any further change to that text is made in your own copy of the Word document you download. Some of your other details and answers do stay correctable on this site afterwards, and because we build the Word document afresh each time you download it, a later download reflects whatever it draws on at that moment.
• What you get is a draft. You are responsible for reading it, completing anything left as a bracketed placeholder, and signing it before you submit it with your application.
• No outcome is promised, and none can be. Your application is decided by the Registrar of Firearms, through the Central Firearms Registry, on an application your Designated Firearms Officer forwards. We are independent of all three, in the same way section 3 says for the rest of this service: we sell a document, not an approval, and we cannot influence one.
• Payment is final. We do not offer refunds. If a payment is reversed by your bank or card scheme, any generation attempt you have not yet used is withdrawn and the application is locked again as unpaid, but a letter you have already generated is not withdrawn: work that has already happened stays done.
• If we refuse a renewal motivation after you have paid. The refusals above are checked again at the moment you press Generate, so any of them can reach you inside the paid part of the wizard: an unfitness answer given at the Annexure field D3 step, a licence that expires while your draft is sitting unfinished, or a green licence you tell us about on the first screen after paying. If that happens, nothing further is charged, none of your three attempts is used, and your draft and every answer in it are kept exactly as they are. If you ticked the wrong answer, correct it and carry on from where you were. If the answer stands, you are holding a payment for a document we will not prepare: reply to your payment receipt and we will sort out what happens next.
• A SAPS motivation letter has to carry your own identity number in its letterhead, so generating one asks for it. What we do with it, including that it never reaches the AI model that writes the letter, is set out in our privacy policy.

11. Liability

To the fullest extent South African law permits, we are not liable for any loss arising from your use of the service. In particular we are not liable for:

• Information that SAPS reports incorrectly, late, or not at all.
• Decisions you take based on what this service showed you.
• The outcome, timing or handling of any application by SAPS.
• The wording, accuracy or completeness of a motivation letter generated through this service, including any error made by the AI model that writes it. You read it, check it, complete it and sign it, as section 10 says.
• The service being unavailable, or an alert not arriving or arriving late.
• Calls you did not use, or an allowance you did not consume, within any billing cycle.

Nothing in these terms excludes any liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including under the Consumer Protection Act where it applies.

12. Your rights as a consumer

Nothing here limits your rights under the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 or the Protection of Personal Information Act 4 of 2013. Your privacy rights, and how to exercise them, are set out in our privacy policy.

13. Our content

The name, design, wording and software of this site belong to us. Status information originating from SAPS is not ours and is shown to you as their record. You are welcome to use what you see about your own application however you like.

14. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The current version number is shown at the top of this page, and the consent recorded when you save an application stores the version in force at that moment, so you can always tell what you agreed to. We will tell you by email before a material change takes effect.

15. Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa, and the South African courts have jurisdiction over any dispute arising from them.

16. Contact

Questions about these terms: info@isitapproved.co.za.

See also our privacy policy.