Terms
What Sema provides, what you are responsible for, how billing works, and what happens when either side wants to stop.
Last updated 24 October 2026
What Sema is
Sema connects your own WhatsApp Business number to a shared inbox, campaigns and payment tools. We are an independent product built on Meta's official WhatsApp Business Platform. We are not Meta, not endorsed by Meta, and WhatsApp is their trademark.
Your WhatsApp number, your WhatsApp Business Account and your customer relationships remain yours. If you leave, they go with you.
What you are responsible for
Consent. You may only message people who agreed to hear from you. This is not our preference, it is the law under the Data Protection Act and it is WhatsApp's policy. Sema records consent and excludes anyone who opts out, but it cannot verify that consent was genuinely obtained. That is yours to stand behind.
What you send. You are responsible for the content of your messages and for following WhatsApp's Business and Commerce Policies. Certain goods cannot be sold over WhatsApp at all.
Your team. Anyone you invite can act on your workspace within the role you give them. Remove people who leave.
What we are responsible for
Keeping the service running, keeping your data separated from every other business using Sema, sending what you ask us to send, and charging you accurately for it.
We bill from what WhatsApp actually charged us, not from our own estimate. Where a message turns out not to be billable, you are not billed. Where a message fails, the cost is refunded to your balance automatically.
Billing
You pay a monthly plan, and for the messages you send. Message rates are set by WhatsApp and vary by the country you are messaging and the type of message. Until 30 September 2026 a reply inside a customer's 24-hour window is free; from 1 October 2026 WhatsApp charges for replies too, after the first 1,000 each month for each number.
Message prices are those on our pricing page for your plan. Either Meta bills its part of each message to the card on your WhatsApp account and we charge the rest from your credit, or we charge the whole price from your credit and pay Meta ourselves. Your Credit page says which applies to you.
Your plan and our charges are drawn from a prepaid balance you top up by M-Pesa, or by card or M-Pesa through Paystack. If the balance runs out, templates and campaigns stop. Replies to customers keep going, up to KES 1,000 below zero (USD 10 if you are billed in dollars), and your next top-up covers them. Support should not stop because of billing.
A new workspace starts with a 14-day trial of the Growth plan, which costs nothing. The plan you choose is taken from your balance monthly in advance. You can cancel at any time, effective at the end of the month you have paid for. If a month cannot be paid for, templates and campaigns pause seven days later until it is. Unused prepaid credit is refundable on request for 12 months.
Kenyan customers are billed in shillings, and businesses outside Kenya in US dollars.
Things outside our control
WhatsApp can restrict, suspend or ban a business number, change its quality rating, change what a message costs, or reject a template. We surface these to you as soon as Meta tells us, but we cannot overrule them and we are not liable for them.
Concretely: if your number is restricted because recipients reported your messages, we will show you why and help you understand it, but we cannot get the number reinstated and we do not refund the plan for that period.
Stopping
You can close your workspace at any time. Export your data first: we delete conversations, contacts and attachments within 30 days, and after that they are gone.
We may suspend an account that is being used to send messages to people who did not consent, to break WhatsApp's policies, or in a way that puts other customers' numbers at risk. Where we can, we will warn you first.
Liability
Our liability is limited to the fees you paid in the three months before the claim. We are not liable for lost profits or lost business.
Nothing here limits liability for anything that cannot lawfully be limited.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of Kenya, and the courts of Kenya have jurisdiction.