Terms of ServicePrivacy PolicyAcceptable UseData Processing AgreementSub-processors

Terms of Service

Last updated 16 October 2026 · version 2026-10-16

These terms are the agreement between your business and Phlare for the use of Phlare, a customer relationship and marketing service. In short: the data you put in is yours and you decide what happens to it; we look after it as your processor under the Data Processing Agreement; you send only to people who have agreed to hear from you, as the Acceptable Use Policy sets out; and either of us can end the agreement, after which you can take your data with you.

The summary helps you read the terms; it is not part of them, and the clauses below govern.

1.Who these terms are between

These terms are between Phlare (“we”, “us”) and the business that creates or uses a Phlare workspace (“you”, the “Customer”).

Phlare

Phlare is a service for businesses and organisations. By creating an account, ticking the box at sign-up, or using the service, you accept these terms on behalf of the business you are acting for, and you confirm that you are at least 18 and have authority to bind it. If you do not have that authority, do not use the service.

These terms include the Acceptable Use Policy and the Data Processing Agreement. Our Privacy Policy explains how we handle personal information for which we are responsible ourselves.

2.Words with a particular meaning

  • Service: Phlare — the website, web application, API, plugins, embeddable forms and scripts, and Phlare sending — as we provide it from time to time.
  • Workspace: a separate organisation inside Phlare, with its own records, members, settings and plan.
  • Users: the people you allow into your workspaces (owners, admins, members and viewers), and anyone acting through an API key you create.
  • Customer Data: everything you or your Users put into the service, or cause it to receive — including information about your contacts, customers, leads, investors and website visitors, the messages you send and receive, orders and events your shop or systems send in, and files you upload.
  • Phlare sending: email sent through our own email infrastructure and sending domain, as opposed to your own mail server or provider.
  • Connected Services: third-party services you connect to the service on your own account, such as your own mail server, SMS gateway, WhatsApp Business account, Google or Microsoft mailbox, or online shop.
  • Plan: the plan a workspace is on, and the limits and allowances that come with it.

3.Your account and your Users

  1. You must give accurate information when you sign up and keep it up to date. We send a link to confirm your email address; until an owner or admin of a workspace has confirmed theirs, that workspace cannot send marketing email through Phlare sending.
  2. Keep passwords and API keys secret. Each person should have their own login. You are responsible for what your Users do in your workspaces, and for giving each of them only the access they need.
  3. Tell us promptly if you believe someone has gained access to your account without permission. We may ask you to verify that a request genuinely comes from you before we act on it.
  4. To protect accounts we limit how often sign-in, sign-up and password resets can be tried, and temporarily lock an address after repeated wrong passwords.

4.Plans, limits and fees

  1. Each workspace is on a Plan. What each Plan includes — for example how many contacts it covers and how much email it may send through Phlare sending each month — is shown on our website and in each workspace under Settings → Plan and usage.
  2. When a monthly email allowance is used up, marketing email through Phlare sending pauses until the next calendar month or until you move to a larger Plan. Invitations, receipts, confirmations and replies to your customers continue. Email sent through your own mail server is not counted.
  3. Text messages, WhatsApp messages and calls go through Connected Services on your own account, and you pay those providers directly.
  4. One person may start only a limited number of workspaces on the Free plan. Creating further accounts or workspaces to get round a Plan’s limits is a breach of these terms.
  5. Where a paid Plan has been agreed with you, you will pay its fees as agreed, together with any value-added or similar tax that applies. Fees already paid are not refundable except where these terms or the law say otherwise.
  6. We may change Plans, their limits or their prices for the future by giving you at least 30 days’ notice. A change does not apply to a period you have already paid for. If you do not accept a change, you may end the agreement before it takes effect.

5.Your data, and our role in it

  1. Customer Data belongs to you. You give us the right to host, copy, transmit, display and otherwise process it only as needed to provide, secure and support the service for you, and as you instruct.
  2. For personal information in Customer Data, you are the controller (the “responsible party” under the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 of South Africa) and we are your processor (the “operator”). The Data Processing Agreement forms part of these terms and governs that processing.
  3. You are responsible for having a lawful basis for the Customer Data you collect and for what you do with it — including the notices you give and the consents you obtain from the people concerned.
  4. We may compile statistics about how the service is used, provided they do not identify you, your Users, your contacts or any other person, and use them to run and improve the service.
  5. You can export your data, and export or erase an individual’s data when they ask you to, from within the service.

6.Sending messages

  1. You are the sender of every message sent from your workspaces, whichever route it takes. You must comply with the laws on electronic marketing and communications that apply to you and to the people you write to — among them section 69 of the Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013 and the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, 2002 in South Africa; the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003 and the UK GDPR in the United Kingdom; and the data protection and communications laws of Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and anywhere else your recipients are.
  2. You must follow the Acceptable Use Policy, including its rules on consent, unsubscribing and identifying yourself.
  3. Phlare adds an unsubscribe link to marketing email and records opt-outs, bounces and complaints on a do-not-contact list. You must not remove or hide the link, or work around the list.
  4. Phlare sending is shared by every workspace that uses it, so we apply daily limits and hold a workspace’s marketing email automatically when its bounce or complaint rate would harm the others, as the Acceptable Use Policy describes. Messages that are not marketing — bookings, receipts, confirmations — are not held.
  5. Messages sent through Connected Services are also subject to those providers’ own terms and policies, including Meta’s policies for WhatsApp Business and the WASPA Code of Conduct where it applies to text messages in South Africa.

7.Connected Services

  1. When you connect a Connected Service, you authorise us to access it on your behalf, and only as needed to do what you have set up — for example to send a message, read replies into a conversation, or bring in orders.
  2. Your use of a Connected Service is governed by your own agreement with its provider, who is not our sub-processor. We are not responsible for a Connected Service’s availability, its charges, or what it does with data you send it.
  3. If a provider changes or withdraws its service, part of Phlare that depends on it may stop working. We will tell you when we know.

8.Acceptable use and suspension

  1. You must not use the service in a way the Acceptable Use Policy forbids, or allow anyone else to.
  2. We may hold sending, or suspend access to a workspace or account, where reasonably necessary because (a) the Acceptable Use Policy or these terms have been breached, (b) there is a risk to the security or integrity of the service or to other customers, (c) the law or a competent authority requires it, or (d) agreed fees are more than 30 days overdue after we have reminded you.
  3. We will limit a suspension to what the reason needs — holding marketing email rather than locking you out where that is enough — and tell you why and what will lift it, unless the law or the risk prevents us. We will lift it once the reason has been dealt with.

9.Availability, changes and support

  1. We work to keep the service available and to fix faults promptly, but we do not promise that it will be uninterrupted or free of errors. Planned maintenance will be kept as short as we can.
  2. We improve the service continually and may change or remove features. We will not make a change that materially reduces the core functionality of a paid Plan during a period you have paid for.
  3. No service level or support commitment applies unless we have agreed one with you in writing.

10.Security

We protect Customer Data with the technical and organisational measures described in the Data Processing Agreement, and will tell you of a personal data breach affecting it as that agreement sets out. You are responsible for the security of your own devices, passwords, API keys and Connected Services, and for the settings you choose in the service.

11.Ending the agreement

  1. You may stop using the service and close your workspaces at any time.
  2. Either of us may end the agreement by written notice if the other materially breaches it and has not put the breach right within 30 days of being told of it. We may end it at once for a serious or repeated breach of the Acceptable Use Policy, or where the law requires us to.
  3. We may end the agreement for any other reason by giving at least 30 days’ notice. If you have paid in advance for a period after the end date, we will refund that part.
  4. When the agreement ends, your access ends. For 30 days afterwards you may ask us to give you a copy of your Customer Data, and we will help you export it. We then delete Customer Data from the live service within a further 30 days, and from any backups as they expire and in any case within 90 days, unless the law requires us to keep it.
  5. Clauses 5, 11.4 and 12 to 16 continue after the agreement ends, together with any other term that by its nature is meant to.

12.Intellectual property and confidentiality

  1. We, and our licensors, own the service and everything in it other than Customer Data. You receive a right to use it under these terms for your business, and nothing more. You must not copy, resell or reverse-engineer it except as the law allows.
  2. If you send us suggestions, we may use them without any obligation to you.
  3. Each of us will keep confidential the other’s non-public information received in connection with the service, use it only for the purposes of this agreement, and disclose it only to people who need it and are bound to keep it confidential, or where the law requires.

13.What we promise, and what we do not

  1. We will provide the service with reasonable skill and care.
  2. Apart from that, and to the extent the law allows, the service is provided as it is and as available, and we give no other warranty — including about fitness for a particular purpose, or that messages will reach an inbox. Delivery depends on recipients’ providers, who decide for themselves.
  3. Nothing in these terms limits any right you have under a law that cannot be excluded or limited by agreement, including, where it applies to you, the Consumer Protection Act, 2008 of South Africa.

14.Limits on liability

  1. Neither of us is liable to the other for loss of profits, revenue, goodwill or anticipated savings, or for indirect or consequential loss, however it arises.
  2. Each party’s total liability to the other under or in connection with this agreement in any period of 12 months is limited to the total fees paid and payable by you for the service in the 12 months before the event that gave rise to the claim.
  3. These limits do not apply to liability for fraud or wilful misconduct, for death or personal injury caused by negligence, to your obligation to pay fees, to your obligations under clause 15, or to any liability that the law does not allow to be limited.

15.Claims about what you send

You will make good any loss we suffer, and defend us, against a claim by a third party or a regulator arising from Customer Data, from messages sent from your workspaces, or from your breach of the Acceptable Use Policy or of the law — provided we tell you of the claim promptly, let you control its defence, and give you reasonable help at your cost.

16.Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. We will tell you of a material change at least 30 days before it takes effect — by email to the owners of your workspaces and by a notice in the service — unless it must take effect sooner for legal or security reasons. Each version carries the date it was last updated. If you do not accept a change, you may end the agreement before it takes effect; continuing to use the service afterwards means you accept it.

17.Notices

We send notices to the email address of the owners of your workspace. You can send notices to us through the contact details on our website.

18.Law and disputes

If a dispute arises, each of us will first try to resolve it by talking in good faith, and neither will start proceedings (except for urgent interim relief) until 30 days after the other has been told of the dispute in writing.

This does not take away any protection given to you by the mandatory law of the country where you are established.

19.General

  1. These terms, with the documents they include, are the whole agreement between us about the service and replace anything said before. If you have signed a separate written agreement with us for the service, that agreement prevails where it differs.
  2. Neither of us is responsible for a failure caused by events beyond our reasonable control, such as a failure of the power or internet infrastructure we depend on.
  3. If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest continues in force. Not enforcing a term straight away is not a waiver of it.
  4. You may not transfer this agreement without our consent. We may transfer it to a business that takes over the service, and will tell you if we do.
  5. No one other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms, including under the Contracts (Rights of Third Parties) Act 1999 in the United Kingdom.
  6. These terms are written in English, and the English version governs.