The lock-in evolved: from contract terms to economic architecture

In 2018, a Discovery Card holder who wanted out of the Discovery Miles benefit faced a sentence any consumer lawyer would recognise: “You may request cancellation of the Discovery Miles benefit, but it will only be effective from the end of the billing year.” (Discovery Miles terms and conditions, 19 June 2018, p. 10, DSC-0154). That is lock-in as the law has long understood it — a contract term, sitting in a terms document, tying a customer to a billing year. It is visible, datable, and the kind of clause consumer protection statutes were written to reach.

Read the same programme’s documents in 2026 and that sentence has no equivalent. There is no billing year to wait out. What the current documents describe instead is an arrangement in which leaving is never prohibited — it is priced, measured, and made expensive by the structure of the products themselves. The lock-in did not disappear. It moved: out of contract terms, into economic architecture. This essay traces that movement through Discovery’s own published documents, captured by this registry in July 2026.

What lock-in used to look like

The corpus’s legacy documents describe the older mechanics in their own words. The 2018 Discovery Miles terms tied participation to an annual fee: “You pay one yearly linkage fee for the Discovery Miles benefit for each Discovery Card account you hold … You have to pay the yearly fee to earn Discovery Miles.” (19 June 2018, p. 1, DSC-0144; ellipsis omits the fee’s collection mechanics). Exit ran on the billing calendar (the cancellation clause above). Accumulated value had a single, predictable limit: “Discovery Miles expire after five years from the date that you earned them. If you don’t use your Discovery Miles before they expire, you will lose them.” (p. 10, DSC-0152). And the provider’s power to change the arrangement came with a qualifier:

“Discovery Miles are issued by Discovery Vitality (Pty) Limited who can, with prior notice:  Decline, issue or withdraw Discovery Miles;  Change these terms and conditions and how Discovery Miles operate;  Change when you can and cannot earn points.” — Discovery Miles terms and conditions, 19 June 2018, pp. 10–11, DSC-0155

“With prior notice.” The dated sequence of Miles rules in the corpus shows what happened to those three words. The 18 February 2021 terms for Discovery Bank clients state:

“Discovery Miles are issued and administrated by Discovery Vitality (Pty) Limited, who can:  Decline, issue or withdraw Discovery Miles  Change these terms and conditions  Change when you can and cannot earn Discovery Miles.” — Discovery Miles terms and conditions, 18 February 2021, p. 20, DSC-0122 (a document served under a filename containing “2022”)

The 17 May 2024 rules for remaining legacy cardholders repeat the clause, likewise without the notice qualifier (Discovery Miles Terms and Conditions, 17 May 2024, p. 10, DSC-0140). In both, the clause is materially the 2018 clause — with “with prior notice” gone. The current terms, dated 1 July 2026, carry the same clause with two footnote markers, and the second footnote reads: “Discovery Bank will give you notice before any changes are made to the Discovery Miles benefit” (p. 34; quoted in full as DSC-1678, with the dataset’s logged ellipsis marking an intervening footnote about Miles not being currency; see also DSC-0093). Notice, which in 2018 was a condition built into the operative sentence, is in 2026 a footnote — present in this document, absent altogether from others in the same product family, as the registry’s HealthyCare entry documents.

Where the lock-in lives now

The registry’s first five entries, read together, describe the current architecture. None of it takes the form of a fixed period.

Benefits are repriced by rolling measurement of behaviour. The Virgin Active gym campaign discounts gym fees by up to 75% — and then makes the discount itself a moving target: “As the main member or spouse with a Virgin Active Club gym membership, you need to complete at least 36 gym workouts in a rolling 12-month period to keep your maximum gym saving of up to75% off the standard monthly gym fee. Otherwise, the up to 75% will reduce to 50%.” (campaign guide, December 2025, p. 3, DSC-3929; the run-together “to75%” appears in the source text). A member who falls short is repriced to 50%, and regains the full discount only after reaching 36 workouts in a rolling 12-month period again, with restoration taking effect the following month (p. 3, DSC-3930). The Miles earn rates work the same way at the level of spending: the current terms tie each month’s reward rate to “average annual spend as at the end of the previous month” (1 July 2026, p. 12, DSC-0063). Nothing here binds the member to stay — but the value of staying is recalculated every month from the member’s own recent behaviour, and any pause registers as a repricing.

Benefits are gated across products. To earn Discovery Miles on card spend, “You must have Vitality Money activated and your account must be in good standing at the time of the transaction to earn Discovery Miles. Transactions that qualify for the Discovery Miles+ Network reward will not qualify to earn base Discovery Miles.” (1 July 2026, p. 7, DSC-0055). The Virgin Active discount requires Vitality Active membership, a qualifying Discovery Bank product with Vitality Money activated, and the gym contract itself — three relationships held simultaneously, with the discount falling away if any one of them lapses while “the standard terms of the Virgin Active contract will continue to apply” (p. 5, DSC-3937). The HealthyFood guide makes boosted rewards conditional on programme membership, bank product and partner loyalty card at the point of sale (June 2026, p. 12, DSC-3389). Each product a benefit depends on is one more product that cancelling would deprice.

Accumulated position is forfeited on exit. In 2018, Miles simply expired after five years. The current terms attach the accumulated balance to the member’s whole product relationship: “Discovery Miles are subject to expiry, which may occur under the following circumstances: • Five (5) years after the date of earning your Discovery Miles • In the event of no earning or spending of Discovery Miles within a consecutive 12-month period (referred to as the “dormancy rule”) • If you no longer have any qualifying Vitality product, such as Vitality Health, Vitality Drive and Vitality Money.” (1 July 2026, p. 33, DSC-0086). A member who closes all their Discovery Bank accounts without first exchanging the balance for cash in the app “will forfeit your total Discovery Miles balance” (p. 33, DSC-0090), and a member who cancels their Vitality policy, programme or benefit forfeits whatever is unspent on its last day (p. 34, DSC-0092). The Miles balance is, in the current documents’ own terms, spendable value that survives only while the products that earned it stay open.

Entering and leaving carry fees. The Virgin Active campaign charges a once-off activation fee equal to a month’s full retail gym fee plus a R125 club access device fee per adult (p. 3, DSC-3927), and exits through Virgin Active’s standard cancellation rules, including an early-cancellation fee “as prescribed by the Consumer Protection Act (CPA), Section 14” for members still in their initial contract (p. 5, DSC-3936).

The structure extends into the household. In the HealthyFood benefit, the main member’s choice of retail partners binds the spouse and dependants, who cannot change it; qualifying spend is counted in an order that starts with the main member; and dependants receive their share of Vitality Active rewards only “provided that the main member on the Vitality Active programme has not revoked consent for this to occur” (June 2026, p. 16, DSC-3392). A family’s position in the programme is architecture too — and it is arranged around one account holder.

And the terms themselves are changeable at discretion. The HealthyCare guide states “These terms and conditions may change at any time.” with no notice sentence (May 2026, p. 6, DSC-2519), while its HealthyFood counterpart adds one (DSC-2552). The Virgin Active campaign document reserves the right to “revise, alter or end the campaign at our discretion”, with the member waiving claims in advance (p. 1, DSC-3918). Even the document layer is unstable: the registry has documented two versions of the same benefit guide, dated more than three years apart, served simultaneously on different product tabs, and current documents stating different values for the same spend threshold and the same points cap. A member trying to establish the exact terms of their position, on a given day, may find that the answer depends on which tab they read.

The question this poses for regulation

South African consumer protection addresses the older form of lock-in directly. Section 14 of the Consumer Protection Act 68 of 2008 governs fixed-term consumer agreements — limiting their duration, giving consumers a right to cancel on notice, and confining cancellation penalties to what is reasonable. The 2018 mechanics quoted above are recognisably the kind of arrangement such rules contemplate: a defined benefit, an annual fee, a billing-year exit. In the Virgin Active campaign guide, the one reference to the Consumer Protection Act sits at exactly this layer — the early-cancellation fee on the underlying gym contract (p. 5, DSC-3936).

Whether those protections reach the current architecture is an open question, and it is the documents themselves that pose it. A rolling 36-workout condition is not a fixed term; there is no period to cap and no expiry date to disclose. Forfeiture of an accumulated Miles balance on account closure is not a cancellation penalty in the contractual sense; the documents frame it as the natural boundary of a rewards account. Cross-product gating creates exit costs that no single agreement states as an exit cost. An arrangement with no fixed term offers the fixed-term protections nothing to attach to — which sits in tension with the outcome those protections exist to secure. Treating Customers Fairly frames one desired outcome as customers not facing unreasonable post-sale barriers to switching; whether the priced consequences of product structure amount to such a barrier is the same question in conduct-of-business terms. This registry asserts no answer, and no unlawfulness. The question is posed here because the documents, read across eight years, pose it.

What the registry is for

None of the above rests on characterising anyone’s intentions, and none of it needs to. Every mechanism described in this essay is stated in Discovery’s own published documents, captured on dated snapshots in July 2026, quoted verbatim, and traceable to a numbered record in the extraction dataset — 4,952 records across 273 documents. The registry exists to hold that evidence still: dated, verbatim, and page-referenced, so that the question of what architectural lock-in is and what should be done about it — by members, journalists, researchers or regulators — can be examined on evidence rather than impressions. The documents will keep changing; some of them, as the entries show, change without notice. The archive does not.