Terms of service

You use Imali on WhatsApp. We provide the bookkeeping bot, the web dashboard, and the reports. You pay for what you choose to pay for (free tier exists). Your data is yours; we don’t sell it. Either of us can end this anytime, in plain language. South African law governs.

This page covers our commercial relationship. How we handle your data is on the privacy notice.

Imali is built for South African informal and small businesses. To use it you must:

• Be a natural person aged 18 or older, or a registered legal entity acting through an authorised representative.
• Have the legal right to log the business transactions you log (i.e. it’s your business, or you act for the business owner).
• Have a working WhatsApp number on a phone you control.
• Not be a sanctioned party under South African or international law, and not be using Imali to launder, evade tax, or otherwise break the law.

Imali is built for adult users. We do not knowingly process the personal information of children (persons under 18) without verifiable parental or guardian consent in accordance with POPIA Section 34. If we become aware that an account belongs to a person under 18, we will close the account and delete the records within 7 calendar days unless we have obtained verifiable parental consent.

We pilot first in Gauteng and the Western Cape. As we expand geographies (Botswana via the BTF pilot is next on the runway), this section updates to reflect what we can support jurisdictionally.

What Imali provides today:

• WhatsApp bot that logs income and expenses, reads receipts (OCR), issues invoices, tracks inventory, and generates weekly & monthly summaries.
• SARS Turnover Tax categorisation aligned to the 1 April 2026 thresholds (R600K tax-free / R2.3M ceiling).
• Conversational Q&A in English, isiZulu, and isiXhosa. Afrikaans is in review; Setswana is on the runway.
• Multi-currency logging across 21 currencies, with daily FX rates from the European Central Bank via Frankfurter.
• A web dashboard at imali.ebstar.co/analytics for the months you want to see at a glance.
• Optional, separately-consented credit signals you can share with lender partners (Lula, Standard Bank, Merchant Capital, Letshego), and aggregated FMCG signals you can share with retail partners.

What Imali is not:

• A bank or e-money issuer. We don’t hold funds.
• A credit provider under the National Credit Act, 2005. We don’t lend.
• A credit bureau within the meaning of section 70 of the National Credit Act. We do not compile a credit information database. With your separate, opt-in consent we can introduce you to a lender partner; the lender then runs its own credit assessment under its own NCR registration. Any “signals” surfaced in the bot are advisory views for your own benefit, not credit reports.
• An accountable institution under the Financial Intelligence Centre Act, 2001. FICA reporting obligations sit with your bank and (where applicable) any lender or payment processor in the chain.
• A SARS-registered tax practitioner. We compute and prep the figures; you (or your registered practitioner) submit the return.
• A medical or safety service. Nothing in Imali is critical-systems-safe and nothing should be relied on for time-critical decisions.

Your WhatsApp number is your Imali account. There is no password; possession of the WhatsApp number is the credential. If you lose access to that number, write to imali@ebstar.co and we’ll re-verify by other means before any data moves.

Each WhatsApp number is one business. The Premium tier supports multi-user teams (up to 3 phones on one business) by inviting additional numbers via the in-bot flow.

Today there are three tiers. Pricing is in South African Rand (ZAR), exclusive of any applicable VAT.

Free

R0/month. 20 transactions/month, receipt OCR, monthly PDF, 3 languages, POPIA compliance. No card needed. No expiry.

Starter

R29/month. Unlimited transactions, weekly summaries, invoice generation, overdue tracking, priority support.

Premium

R99/month. Everything in Starter plus SARS TT03 prep, live inventory alerts, multi-user teams (up to 3), stokvel management, cash-flow projections.

How billing works.Paid tiers bill monthly via your chosen payment method (Peach Payments or Stitch, depending on your bank). The first month of Starter or Premium is free if you upgrade from the Free tier — you can cancel before the month ends to avoid any charge.

Auto-renewal.Paid subscriptions renew automatically at the start of each billing month until you cancel. We charge the payment method you registered until you tell us to stop. The renewal happens whether or not you have opened WhatsApp in the past month — we do not pause for inactivity. To see your next renewal date or billing history, reply billing on WhatsApp.

How cancellation works. Reply cancelon WhatsApp; we confirm by email within one business day. Your subscription stops at the end of the current billing period; no pro-rata refunds for partial months unless we’ve caused the cancellation. Your data stays in your account on the Free tier; if you want it deleted, see the privacy notice.

Cooling-off (CPA Section 44). If you upgraded to a paid tier directly in response to a marketing message we sent you (a WhatsApp template, an email, or an SMS marketing campaign), you have 5 business days from the date of the upgrade to cancel for a full refund, no reason needed. Reply cooling off on WhatsApp. Cooling-off does not apply where you upgraded on your own initiative.

Refunds.If our service is materially broken on the paid tier and we can’t fix it within seven calendar days, we refund the affected month on request.

The business records you create on Imali — transactions, invoices, inventory, receipts — are yours. Always. We hold them on your behalf and don’t claim any ownership.

You can export everything by replying export on WhatsApp. You get a CSV plus a PDF in your own copy of WhatsApp. You can do this at any time, on any tier, including after cancellation (during the SARS / FICA retention window).

We use the data to provide the service to you. We aggregate anonymised signals (with K-anonymity ≥ 50 floor) for informal-economy market intelligence we share with FMCG and financial partners — you can opt out of that aggregation in the bot at any time by replying opt out.

We don’t train third-party AI models on your data. The OpenAI processing we do for OCR and language understanding is subject to an API agreement that explicitly excludes training.

By using Imali, you agree not to:

• Log transactions for a business that isn’t yours (or that you’re not authorised to act for).
• Use Imali to launder funds, evade tax obligations, finance illegal activity, or breach FICA / NCA / POPIA / consumer-protection law.
• Upload receipts or images that contain content you don’t have the right to use, or that depict illegal goods.
• Attempt to break Imali’s security, probe our infrastructure, or exfiltrate other merchants’ data.
• Use Imali to spam or harass other people (including via the invoice flow).
• Resell access to Imali or wrap it in a service you charge for, without a separate written agreement with us.

If we believe in good faith you’re breaking this section, we can suspend the account immediately and explain why. We don’t suspend silently.

Imali is a working pre-seed product. We run on free-tier infrastructure today (Render, Neon, Cloudflare R2) and target best-effort availability — not a contractual uptime SLA. Practically, we’ve been up >99% over the first month of production.

WhatsApp dependency.Imali talks to you over Meta’s WhatsApp Business API. If Meta changes policy, blocks us, or has an outage, Imali is affected in lockstep. The WhatsApp service you use is governed by Meta’s own terms.

Rate limits. The Free tier is capped at 20 transactions/month and is subject to per-minute message limits to keep abuse out. Paid tiers raise the caps materially; we publish current limits in the bot when relevant.

Beta features.Some features are explicitly labelled “beta” or “preview” in the bot. Those are provided as-is and may change without prior notice. We announce removal at least 30 days in advance.

Imali depends on several third parties. We pick them carefully, sign agreements where appropriate, and disclose them in the privacy notice. The headline ones, and what they do:

• Meta WhatsApp Business API — messaging transport.
• OpenAI (GPT-4o-mini) — OCR for receipt photos and language understanding for message intent. Subject to an API agreement that excludes training use.
• Peach Payments / Stitch — subscription billing.
• Render, Neon, Cloudflare R2 — hosting, database, file storage.
• Frankfurter / ECB — daily FX rates.

If you have a credit signal or FMCG data partnership active with us, the relevant lender or retailer becomes a third party that receives data with your separate consent.

We own the Imali name, the logo, the source code, the bot workflow, the design, and the documentation. You don’t get a licence to any of that beyond using the service as it’s offered to you. Don’t copy the bot, reverse-engineer the API, or use our name in a way that suggests a partnership that doesn’t exist.

You keep all rights to your business records and to anything you create through Imali (your invoices, your PDFs, your reports). We have a limited, terminable licence to process them to provide the service.

If you give us feedback or feature ideas, we’re free to act on them without owing you a royalty. We’ll credit sharply-original suggestions where it’s polite to.

You. Cancel anytime by replying cancel on WhatsApp. Subscription stops at end of billing period; data is preserved on the Free tier, or deleted on request via the privacy notice channels (reply stop on WhatsApp).

Us.We can suspend an account immediately for acceptable-use violations, fraud signals, or if continuing the service would put us in breach of law or platform policy (especially Meta’s). For lesser cause — non-payment after a missed renewal, prolonged inactivity — we give 14 days’ notice and an export window before any deletion.

On termination, your data export is available for 30 days at the most-recent address we have for you. The privacy notice governs the retention beyond that window.

Service provided “as is”. We work hard to make Imali accurate (OCR readings, tax categorisations, FX rates, credit signals) but we do not warrant the service is error-free. Always verify against the underlying source for material decisions (SARS submissions, lender applications, supplier payments).

Liability cap. Subject to the carve-outs below, our total liability to you for any direct loss arising out of or in connection with the service in any 12-month period is capped at the greater of (a) the fees you paid us in that period, or (b) R5,000. We do not cover indirect, consequential, special, or punitive damages, nor loss of profit, goodwill or anticipated savings.

Carve-outs. The cap above does not apply to, and nothing in these terms limits or excludes, our liability for:

• fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation;
• gross negligence, irrespective of the type of loss caused (Consumer Protection Act, 2008, section 51(1)(c)(i));
• wilful misconduct;
• any liability that cannot be limited or excluded under the Consumer Protection Act, 2008 where it applies to your transaction (in particular sections 48 to 52 on unfair, unreasonable or unjust contract terms, section 55 on the right to quality service, and section 61 on liability for harm caused by defective goods or services);
• any liability arising under POPIA, the Electronic Communications and Transactions Act, 2002, or any other South African law that cannot be limited by agreement;
• personal injury or death caused by our negligence.

Your duty to mitigate. You are responsible for keeping your own copies of records you rely on for SARS, lender, or other regulatory purposes. The bot makes export easy (reply export) and we encourage you to do so at least monthly. We will not compensate for losses you could reasonably have avoided by exporting your data.

We update these terms when the product, the regulatory environment, or our infrastructure changes materially. When we update them, we message you on WhatsApp at least 14 days before the change takes effect, with a one-line summary of what’s different and a link to the new version.

Routine, non-material changes— typo fixes, clearer phrasing, new examples, new sub-processors in an already-disclosed region, changes that benefit you — take effect on the published date. Continued use of the service after that date is acceptance.

Material changes— any change to pricing, to the liability cap, to the scope of personal information we process, to the cross-border processing locations, or any change required by a change in law that affects your rights — require your affirmative re-acceptance. We will ask you on WhatsApp to reply I accept before the change applies to you. If you do not, your existing terms continue to apply for the next billing period and we will speak to you again about renewal.

Each version stays archived. Old versions are available on request from imali@ebstar.co.

These terms are governed by the law of the Republic of South Africa.

Forum.Any dispute that cannot be resolved by talking goes to the High Court of South Africa, Gauteng Division (Johannesburg). For claims within their jurisdictional limits, the Magistrates’ Courts and the Small Claims Court of South Africa have concurrent jurisdiction at the consumer’s election; nothing in these terms restricts your right to elect a lower court.

Before going to court, please write to imali@ebstar.co with the specifics — we’ve resolved every issue so far without one. If the Consumer Protection Act applies to your transaction, you also have the right to refer the dispute to the National Consumer Commission under section 71 of that Act.

One inbox, read by a human (usually the founder):

General · imali@ebstar.co
Privacy · imali@ebstar.co
Partnerships · imali@ebstar.co