Acceptable Use Policy

This Acceptable Use Policy ("AUP") forms part of your agreement with PropChat and supplements the Terms of Service, the Operator Agreement, and the Privacy Policy. By using PropChat, the Agency agrees to this AUP.

PropChat is messaging infrastructure for cold outreach by South African estate agencies. We make it possible to do cold outreach safely and lawfully, but we do not pretend that doing it well is purely voluntary on the Agency's part. The platform enforces a set of technical safeguards described below; you cannot turn them off, and you cannot route around them.

1. Permitted use

The PropChat service is licensed to the Agency for direct marketing of the Agency's own real-estate services to data subjects for whom the Agency has a documented lawful basis under POPIA Section 11 (consent, contract, legitimate interest, or any other listed ground). The platform supports two operational postures:

• Cold outreach — first-touch sends to data subjects with whom the Agency has not previously messaged. This requires the Agency to identify a lawful basis, attest to it at import time (Section 3 below), and use a Meta-approved first-touch template with mandatory in-message opt-out.
• Warm conversation — replies to inbound messages and ongoing conversations within Meta's customer-service window with contacts who have not opted out.

2. Lawful basis at import — required

Before PropChat writes any contact to your tenant from a bulk import, the importing agent must tick a lawful-basis attestation on the preview screen. The attestation is recorded against the agent's account and timestamp and stored on the import audit row.

This attestation is what we will produce if the Information Regulator asks "what lawful basis did the Agency have when this person was imported into PropChat?" The Agency warrants the attestation is true. PropChat accepts the attestation in good faith and is not in a position to verify it independently.

Acceptable lawful bases under POPIA Section 11 for direct marketing purposes include:

• Section 11(1)(a) — consent of the data subject (e.g. a signed contact form or web opt-in).
• Section 11(1)(b) — necessary to perform a contract with the data subject (e.g. an existing client relationship).
• Section 11(1)(f) — legitimate interest, read with Section 69(3)(a)–(c) for direct marketing. We treat the documented property relationship between an estate agency and a property owner recorded in the deeds office as falling under this ground for the purpose of a single first-touch message bearing mandatory in-message opt-out, pending lawyer audit.

3. Technical safeguards we enforce

The following safeguards are not optional. They run on every message and every import. The Agency cannot disable them.

3.1 Tenant-wide opt-out propagation

When a data subject replies STOP (or any of our recognised opt-out keywords — STOP ALL, UNSUBSCRIBE, OPT-OUT, CANCEL, END, QUIT, NO, REMOVE), their opt-out is recorded as tenant-wide and sticky: it applies to every channel of that contact across the Agency's tenant, and it persists across re-imports. Only an explicit START reply (or SUBSCRIBE / UNSTOP / RESUME / YES / OPT-IN) lifts an opt-out — silence or any other reply does not.

3.2 Throttling per WABA

Every WhatsApp Business Account ("WABA") connected to PropChat has an hourly send bucket enforced by the platform:

• Standard tier — 60 sends per hour total, with a sub-cap of 30 first-touch sends per hour. This is the default.
• Ramp-up tier — 200 sends per hour total, 100 first-touch. Available after sustained clean send history.

When the bucket is full, the campaign sender pauses and resumes at the next hour boundary. The Agency cannot raise these limits.

3.3 Auto-pause on quality drops or rolling-window failures

PropChat subscribes to Meta's phone_number_quality_update webhook. If Meta downgrades the WABA quality score to YELLOW or RED, all outbound sends from that WABA are hard-paused immediately. The Agency must acknowledge the pause from the WABA Health dashboard before sending resumes.

Independently, PropChat computes a rolling-window failure rate: if combined block-suspect failures (Meta error codes 131056, 131000, 470, 131047, 131051) plus inbound opt-out replies exceed 2% of the last 100 sent messages, the WABA is hard-paused. Same acknowledgement flow applies.

This is in everyone's interest. A WABA that is allowed to keep sending after Meta has flagged it ends up suspended directly by Meta, often with no warning and no easy path to reinstatement.

3.4 Cold-outreach campaign mode

When you create a campaign whose audience contains any first-touch recipient (a contact with no prior outbound history on this tenant), PropChat forces the campaign into cold-outreach mode:

• You cannot send freeform text — only a Meta-approved template.
• The template must be marked first-touch-approved in your agency's template library. We provide a checklist for what that means.
• You must tick a per-campaign acknowledgement that you accept the first-touch rules before the campaign creates.

3.5 Mandatory in-message opt-out

Every freeform message sent through PropChat's campaign sender automatically appends "Reply STOP to unsubscribe" to the body if the message body does not already include the word "STOP". This is not configurable.

For Meta-approved templates, the in-message opt-out language must be baked into the template body before Meta approves it — Meta does not let us inject footers at send time on templates. Cold-outreach campaign mode (Section 3.4) refuses to send a template that does not carry the language.

3.6 Audit logging

Every dispatched outbound message, every block-suspect failure, every opt-out reply, and every quality-drop webhook event is logged to a per-tenant audit trail. The same trail powers the WABA Health dashboard and would be the evidentiary record if the Agency were asked to demonstrate compliance to a regulator.

3.7 Send paths consult the resolver

PropChat has four outbound send paths: campaign broadcasts, inbox 1:1 replies, automated chatbot flow steps, and monthly performance summary DMs to agents. All four consult the same consent resolver before any message leaves the platform. An agent cannot route around an opt-out by replying from the inbox.

4. Prohibited use

The Agency will not, and will not permit any of its agents or third parties to, use PropChat to:

• Send messages to data subjects for whom no lawful basis exists, or where the attested basis is false.
• Continue to send to a data subject who has opted out, by any technical or procedural means.
• Disable, circumvent, or attempt to circumvent the throttle limits, the auto-pause, the in-message opt-out, the lawful-basis attestation, or any other safeguard described in Section 3.
• Send spam, scams, phishing, fraudulent content, hate speech, harassment, adult content, gambling promotions, hate speech, content infringing third-party intellectual property, or any content prohibited by Meta's WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy or by South African law.
• Impersonate another person, agency, or business; misrepresent the Agency's identity, registration status, or affiliation; or use sender-identification language that contradicts the Agency's actual registered details.
• Reverse-engineer, scrape, exfiltrate, or attempt to discover the source code, schema, or internal mechanics of PropChat beyond what South African law permits.
• Use PropChat for any unlawful purpose, or in any way that could damage, disable, overburden, or impair the platform or any other Agency's use of it.
• Process Special Personal Information as defined in POPIA Section 26 (race, health, sexual orientation, biometrics, etc.) through the platform without the additional consent required by POPIA Sections 27–33. PropChat is not designed to process such data and provides no additional safeguards for it.
• Process the personal information of a child as defined in POPIA Section 1 without the prior consent of the child's competent person (POPIA Sections 34–35). The deeds-office relationship that we treat as legitimate-interest for adult property owners does not extend to minors.

5. Suspension and consequences

PropChat reserves the right to suspend the Agency's outbound sending, with or without prior notice, in any of the following circumstances:

• The auto-pause threshold (Section 3.3) is triggered.
• Meta downgrades the WABA quality score to YELLOW or RED.
• PropChat reasonably believes the Agency has materially breached this AUP, the Terms, the Operator Agreement, Meta's WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy, or POPIA.
• The Agency's send behaviour materially threatens the stability or reputation of the PropChat platform — for example, a single Agency's quality drop visibly affecting Meta's posture toward the PropChat tenant base, or a pattern of high opt-out rates suggesting consent records are unreliable. This is a platform-protection clause and is intentionally broad.
• A regulator, court, or law enforcement agency requires us to do so.

Suspension under this section blocks outbound sending only — the Agency retains read access to its data, the inbox, and the audit trail, and can export its contact list. PropChat will provide written reasons for the suspension within 5 business days and a path to remediation where the breach is curable.

Repeated or uncured material breach is grounds for termination under the Terms of Service. On termination, the data return / deletion provisions of the Operator Agreement apply.

6. Agency warranties and indemnity

The Agency warrants that:

• It has, and will continue to have for the duration of its subscription and for at least 3 (three) years after termination, verifiable records of the lawful basis for every contact it has imported into or generated through PropChat, in a form sufficient to satisfy a request from the Information Regulator.
• It has informed its end-customers, in a POPIA-compliant privacy notice, of the processing carried out through PropChat and of the fact that PropChat acts as its Operator.
• Every lawful-basis attestation it submits at import is true and complete to the best of the attesting agent's knowledge.
• It will respond to every data subject access, correction, deletion, or objection request within POPIA's time limits, in its capacity as Responsible Party.

The Agency indemnifies and holds harmless SA FitFoodz (Pty) Ltd t/a PropChat, its directors, employees, and agents from and against any claim, fine, judgment, damage, loss, liability, cost, or expense (including reasonable legal fees) arising out of:

• An Information Regulator action, fine, or enforcement notice arising from the Agency's processing of personal information through PropChat, except to the extent caused by PropChat's own breach of its Operator obligations.
• Any breach by the Agency of its warranties in this Section 6.
• Any claim by an end-customer or third party concerning a message sent through PropChat on the Agency's instructions.
• Any breach by the Agency of Meta's WhatsApp Business Messaging Policy resulting in suspension of the WABA or loss to PropChat.

7. Reporting violations

If you (an Agency, an end-customer, or a third party) believe an Agency is using PropChat in violation of this AUP, please report to legal@propchat.co.za with sufficient detail (phone numbers, message content, screenshots where appropriate) for us to investigate. We respond within 5 business days.

8. Relationship to other documents

This AUP supplements the Terms of Service. The Agency's POPIA Operator obligations between PropChat and the Agency are set out in the standalone Operator Agreement. Data subject rights are described in the POPIA / Data Subject Rights page. Privacy disclosure for both Agency and end-customer data is in the Privacy Policy. In the event of conflict, the Terms of Service prevail.

9. Effective date

This AUP is effective as of 2026-05-06, version 2026-05-06-cold-outreach-draft.