Terms of service

Give us accurate details when you sign up and keep them current. Keep your password to yourself: anything done through your account is treated as done by you. Tell us straight away if you think someone else has access. One account serves one business.

New accounts start on a free trial with a monthly limit on how many feedback requests you can send. No card is needed for the trial. Paid plans are billed monthly in South African rand through PayFast at the price shown when you subscribe; your card details never reach our servers.

• Upgrades take effect immediately, with a pro-rata charge for the remainder of the current billing period.
• Downgrades take effect at the end of the current billing period.
• Cancellation: you can cancel any time from your billing page. Billing stops and you keep your plan until the end of the period you have paid for. No refunds for partial periods.
• Non-payment: if a payment fails, sending is suspended until payment is brought up to date. Your data is not deleted for non-payment.

We may change plan prices with at least 30 days' notice by email. If you do not accept a price change, you can cancel before it takes effect.

When you use RateMate to contact your customers, you are the responsible party under the Protection of Personal Information Act and RateMate is your operator. This section is the written contract POPIA section 21 requires between us.

• We process your customers' information only to provide the service and on your instructions, and we treat it as confidential. We never sell it or use it to market anything.
• We apply reasonable technical and organisational safeguards to secure it, and we will notify you without undue delay if we become aware of unauthorised access to it.
• You confirm that every customer you add has consented to be contacted, or you use your RateMate link or QR code, where customers give consent themselves. Each confirmation is logged.
• Customer opt-outs are honoured automatically and re-checked before every send. You must not try to work around them.
• We use sub-operators to deliver the service: Meta Platforms (WhatsApp), SMSPortal (SMS), and our hosting and email providers. Message content and numbers pass through their systems, which may be outside South Africa.
• Sends, consent changes, opt-outs and deletions are recorded in an append-only audit log so both of us can prove they happened.
• If a customer asks you to delete their details, you can erase them from your dashboard, or ask us to. When your account closes, we delete your customers' personal information in line with our privacy policy.

You agree to use RateMate only to:

• ask your own customers for feedback about work you actually did for them, and follow up on that feedback;
• send content that is lawful and not misleading or offensive.

You agree not to:

• send marketing broadcasts, cold outreach, or messages to people who are not your customers;
• buy, fake, or incentivise reviews, or otherwise breach Google's review policies;
• breach WhatsApp's business messaging policies or South African messaging regulations;
• probe, overload, or interfere with the service or other businesses' data.

We may suspend sending, or the account, if these rules are broken or if a carrier (such as Meta) requires it. Where practical we will warn you first and give you a chance to put it right.

Messages are delivered by Meta Platforms (WhatsApp) and SMSPortal (SMS) over mobile networks we do not control. We hand messages to these carriers reliably and track delivery status, but we cannot guarantee that any individual message arrives or when.

The RateMate platform, its software, design and branding belong to us. Your business information, your customers' details and the feedback they submit belong to you (subject to your customers' own POPIA rights). You give us permission to process that data only as needed to run the service for you.

RateMate is provided as-is. We work to keep it available and accurate but do not guarantee uninterrupted or error-free operation, and we are not responsible for decisions you take based on feedback or review data shown in the product.

To the extent the law allows, our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the fees you paid us in the three months before the event giving rise to the claim, and neither of us is liable to the other for indirect or consequential loss such as lost profits. Nothing in these terms excludes liability that cannot lawfully be excluded, including your rights under the Consumer Protection Act where it applies.

You are responsible for your own legal grounds to contact your customers. If a third party brings a claim against us because you added people without consent or broke the acceptable-use rules, you will cover the costs of that claim.

You can stop using RateMate and cancel your subscription at any time. We can end the agreement with 30 days' notice, or immediately for a serious breach of these terms. Before your account closes you can ask us for a copy of your data; after it closes we delete personal information, keeping only what the audit log and the law require.

If we change these terms in a way that matters, we will tell you by email or in the dashboard at least 30 days before the change takes effect. Using the service after that date means you accept the new terms; if you do not, cancel before they take effect.

These terms are governed by South African law. Together with the privacy policy they are the whole agreement between us. Questions? Contact us at support@ratemate.co.za.