Terms of Service · SwalaSMS

Last updated: 6 September 2026
Version: 2026-09-06

These terms govern your use of the SwalaSMS website, web portal, mobile app and SMS API (the “Service”), operated by SwalaSMS (“we”, “us”, “our”). By creating an account, ticking the acceptance box at sign-up, or sending a message through the Service, you enter into a binding agreement on these terms. If you do not accept them, do not use the Service.

If you accept these terms on behalf of a company or other organisation, you confirm that you are authorised to bind it, and “you” means both you and that organisation.

1. Your account

You must be 18 or older and authorised to act for the business you register.
Give accurate details and keep them current. We may suspend or close an account whose details are false, incomplete or unverifiable.
You are responsible for everything done under your account, including by your staff, contractors and anyone using your API keys, whether or not you authorised it. Keep your password and keys secret and turn on two-factor authentication.
Tell us at once if you believe your account has been used without your permission. Until you do, activity under your account is treated as yours.
One account per business. Opening additional accounts to evade a suspension, a limit or a charge is a breach of these terms.

2. Credits and payment

The Service is prepaid: you buy SMS credits and each message consumes credits according to its length and destination.
Prices are shown before you buy. A long message is sent as more than one SMS and is charged accordingly.
Credits are added when a payment clears. Credits do not expire while your account is open and in good standing.
Credits have no cash value, are not transferable between accounts, and are not redeemable for money. Except where the law requires it, or where we have charged you for a service we failed to provide, credits are not refundable.
A message accepted by an operator is charged even if the handset is switched off, barred or unreachable. That is how operator billing works, and the delivery report will show what happened.
Where a payment is reversed, charged back or found to be fraudulent, we may reverse the corresponding credits and suspend the account until the matter is settled.
Prices may change. A change never affects credits you have already bought.

3. Sender IDs

Sender IDs are approved by the mobile operators and the regulator, not by us. We submit your request and pass on their decision. We do not promise that any request will be approved, or approved within any period.
Only request a sender ID you have the right to use. Requesting a name belonging to somebody else (a bank, a government body, another business, a trade mark you do not own) is grounds for immediate suspension and is reported.
You warrant that you own or are licensed to use every name you submit, and you indemnify us against any claim that it infringes another party's rights.
An approved sender ID can be withdrawn or suspended by an operator or the regulator at any time, and we must act on that instruction.

4. Acceptable use

You may only message people who have given you their number and agreed to hear from you. You must not use the Service to send:

Unsolicited marketing to people who did not opt in.
Messages that impersonate another person or organisation, or that are designed to deceive, including phishing, fake payment or delivery notices, and false prize or lottery claims.
Fraudulent, deceptive, gambling, adult or illegal content, or anything prohibited by the operators or the regulator.
Threats, harassment, hate speech, incitement, or anything intended to alarm or distress the recipient.
Messages to numbers you obtained by scraping, purchase, rental, exchange, or any means other than the person giving them to you directly.
Content that infringes copyright, trade marks or any other third-party right.
Malware, links to malicious sites, or anything designed to interfere with a device or network.

You must honour opt-outs. When a recipient replies STOP, we record it and block further messages from you to that number. You must not attempt to work around an opt-out, including by re-importing the number, using a different sender ID, or moving it to another account.

You must comply with all laws applying to your messages, including the Electronic and Postal Communications Act and the regulations made under it, the Personal Data Protection Act, the Cybercrimes Act, and any direction issued by the Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (“TCRA”) or a mobile network operator.

5. Spam: zero tolerance

This section describes what happens if you send spam. Read it before you send anything.

“Spam” means any message sent to a recipient who did not give you their number and consent to receive it, any message breaching section 4, and any bulk messaging that an operator, the TCRA or we reasonably determine to be unsolicited, deceptive or abusive.

If we determine that you have sent spam through the Service, all of the following may follow at once and without prior notice:

Immediate suspension. Your account, your API keys and your sender IDs are suspended or terminated immediately, without warning and without a cure period. Campaigns in progress are stopped.
No refund. Credits are forfeited. Unused credits on a suspended or terminated account are forfeited in full and are not refunded, transferred or reinstated, whatever they cost you. You accept this as a reasonable pre-estimate of the cost and regulatory exposure your breach causes us, and not as a penalty.
Report to the authorities. We report the activity to the TCRA, to the affected mobile network operators, and to the police or any other competent authority. That report includes your registered name and business details, your registered phone number and email address, the sending account and API keys, the message content, the recipient numbers, the timestamps, delivery reports and the IP addresses used. You expressly consent to this disclosure and waive any objection to it.
You pay the cost. You are liable for any fine, penalty, levy, blocking charge or cost imposed on us by an operator, the regulator or a court because of your messages, and for our reasonable costs in dealing with the incident, including legal and investigation costs.
Permanent ban. We may refuse to serve you again. Opening a new account after a spam termination is a further breach, and any credits bought on that account are forfeited as well.

We screen traffic for spam and prohibited content, automatically and by hand, and we keep records of what was sent. We may block, delay or refuse any message or campaign at our discretion, without notice, where we reasonably suspect a breach. Messages blocked for this reason are not refunded.

Our reasonable determination that a message is spam is enough to trigger this section. We are not required to prove a recipient complained, and an operator or regulator's finding is conclusive between us.

6. Your data and your contacts

Your contacts and message content remain yours. We hold them to run the Service and do not sell them or use them for our own marketing.
You warrant that you have the right to hold and upload every contact you upload, that you have a lawful basis for messaging them, that you have given them the notice the law requires, and that you can produce evidence of their consent on request.
You are the data controller for your contacts and message content. We act as your processor. You are responsible for your own compliance with data protection law, and we are not liable for your failure to obtain consent.
We may require you to produce your consent records within seven days of a request. Failure to produce them is treated as an absence of consent.
If you import contacts from Google, that import is optional, read-only, and covered by our Privacy Policy.
How we handle personal data is set out in the Privacy Policy, which forms part of these terms.

7. Monitoring and disclosure

We do not read your messages for our own purposes. We do inspect traffic, content and metadata where it is necessary to run the Service, to enforce these terms, to investigate a suspected breach, or to answer an operator, the TCRA, a court or the police. We may disclose your account details, message content and logs to any of them where we are required to, or where we reasonably believe it is necessary to prevent or report a crime. Where the law allows it, we will tell you.

8. Availability and delivery

We work to keep the Service available and to route messages promptly, but delivery depends on mobile networks and third parties we do not control.
We do not guarantee that any message will be delivered, delivered intact, or delivered within any particular time, and we give no uptime commitment unless we have signed a separate written service level agreement with you.
Delivery statuses in your reports come from the operators. “Sent” means accepted by the network; “delivered” means the network confirmed receipt. We are not responsible for a status an operator reports incorrectly.
We may carry out maintenance, and will avoid peak hours where we can.
We may throttle, queue or re-route traffic to protect the platform or to meet an operator's requirements.

9. The API

API keys identify your account. Treat them as passwords, and rotate them if exposed. Messages sent with your key are your messages.
Requests are rate limited to protect the platform. Persistent abuse of the limits may lead to suspension.
You must not reverse engineer, resell or provide the Service to a third party as your own without our written agreement.
We may change the API, and will give reasonable notice of a breaking change.

10. Suspension and cancellation

You can close your account at any time from the portal or by writing to us. Closing an account does not refund unused credits.
We may suspend or terminate an account immediately for a breach of these terms, for non-payment, where an operator or the regulator requires it, or where we reasonably believe the account is being used unlawfully.
We may terminate an account without cause on thirty days' notice, and will refund unused credits where we do so.
On closure we delete your contacts, groups and templates, and keep records for as long as the law and section 11 require.

11. Warranties and disclaimer

The Service is provided “as is” and “as available”. To the fullest extent the law allows, we exclude all warranties, conditions and terms implied by statute or common law, including any implied warranty of merchantability, satisfactory quality, fitness for a particular purpose, non-infringement, accuracy or uninterrupted operation.

We do not warrant that the Service will be error free, that defects will be corrected, or that it is free of harmful components. You are responsible for satisfying yourself that the Service is suitable for your purposes before you rely on it.

12. Liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential, exemplary or punitive loss; for lost profit, lost revenue, lost business, lost goodwill, lost opportunity, wasted expenditure or lost or corrupted data; or for any loss arising from a message that was delayed, undelivered, misdelivered or delivered with an incorrect status, however that loss arises and whether or not we were told it was possible.

Where we are found liable despite the above, our total aggregate liability for all claims arising in any twelve-month period is limited to the amount you actually paid us for the Service in the three months immediately before the event giving rise to the first claim, or SwalaSMS's published price for 1,000 SMS, whichever is lower.

We are not liable for any claim brought by a recipient of your messages, by an operator or by a regulator that arises from your use of the Service. That liability is yours, and section 13 applies.

Any claim against us must be brought within twelve months of the date you first knew, or reasonably should have known, of the circumstances giving rise to it. After that, the claim is barred.

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits liability that cannot lawfully be excluded or limited, including for fraud, fraudulent misrepresentation, or death or personal injury caused by negligence. Where any exclusion in this section is held unenforceable, it applies to the maximum extent permitted and the rest of the section is unaffected.

13. Indemnity

You will defend, indemnify and hold harmless SwalaSMS, its directors, employees, agents and suppliers against all claims, demands, proceedings, fines, penalties, losses, damages and reasonable costs (including legal fees on a full indemnity basis) arising out of or connected with:

the messages you send and the content in them;
the contacts you upload and your basis for holding and messaging them;
any sender ID you request or use;
your breach of these terms or of any law, regulation or operator requirement; and
any claim by a recipient, an operator, the TCRA or any other authority relating to your use of the Service.

This indemnity survives termination of your account. We will tell you of any claim we seek to be indemnified for, and you may not settle it in a way that admits fault on our part without our written agreement.

14. Force majeure

We are not liable for any failure or delay caused by something outside our reasonable control, including network or operator failure, power or internet outage, regulatory action, industrial action, fire, flood, epidemic, civil unrest, war, terrorism, cyber attack or act of government.

15. Changes

We may update these terms. The date and version at the top change when we do, and we will tell account holders by email when a change is material. Continuing to use the Service after a change takes effect means you accept it. If you do not accept a change, stop using the Service and close your account; unused credits are refunded only where the change materially disadvantages you and you close the account within thirty days of being told.

16. General

Entire agreement. These terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us and replace anything said or written beforehand. You confirm you have not relied on any statement not set out here.
Severability. If any provision is held invalid or unenforceable, it is modified to the least extent needed to make it enforceable, or struck out, and the rest continues in force.
No waiver. A delay or failure to enforce any provision is not a waiver of it, and does not prevent us enforcing it later.
Assignment. You may not assign or transfer this agreement without our written consent. We may assign it to a successor to our business.
Survival. Sections 5, 6, 7, 11, 12, 13, 16 and 17 survive termination.
No partnership. Nothing here creates a partnership, agency or employment relationship between us.
Third parties. Nobody other than you and us has any right to enforce these terms.
Notices. We may give notice by email to the address on the account, and it takes effect when sent. Notices to us go to the address in section 18.

17. Governing law and disputes

These terms and any dispute arising out of them, including non-contractual disputes, are governed by the laws of the United Republic of Tanzania.

Before starting proceedings, you agree to write to us setting out the dispute and to allow us thirty days to resolve it. If it is not resolved in that time, the courts of Tanzania have exclusive jurisdiction, and you submit to that jurisdiction. Nothing in this section prevents either of us applying for an injunction or other urgent relief.

18. Contact

SwalaSMS
Email: sms@swalatech.com
Phone: +255 748 859 172
Dar es Salaam, Tanzania