Terms of Service

These Terms of Service ("Terms") govern your use of Fetan SMS and the surrounding services operated by Fetan Technologies ("we", "us", "our"). By installing or using the app, or by signing in to the Admin Console or Partner Portal, you agree to these Terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you do not agree, do not use the service.

1. What the service does

Fetan SMS reads bank deposit SMS on the Android device it is installed on, parses the payment details, records them in the app, and delivers an alert to the Telegram chats you connect. Related services include our REST API, the Fetan Alert Bot on Telegram, the Admin Console used by our staff, and the Partner & Sales Portal used by our resellers. Most features require an active trial or subscription.

2. Eligibility

You must be able to enter into a binding contract under applicable law. If you use the service on behalf of a business, you confirm that you are authorised to bind that business to these Terms. The service is intended for business use in Ethiopia and is not directed at children.

3. Your account and device

• You must give accurate registration details — in particular a phone number you control.
• Your account is bound to one device. This exists to stop a single subscription being shared across many phones. Moving to a new phone creates a transfer request that our team reviews and approves.
• Each device is entitled to one free trial.
• You are responsible for everything done through your account and for keeping your device secure. Tell us promptly if you believe it has been misused.

4. Trial, subscription and payment

New accounts receive a free trial with full features. After it ends, an active subscription is required to continue receiving alerts.

• Your plan starts when our team verifies your payment, not when the transfer is made.
• Prices and plan lengths are shown in the app before you choose a plan. We may change them, and any change applies to your next renewal, not to a period already paid for.
• Payments are for a fixed period and are not refundable on a pro-rata basis when you stop using the service, except where the law requires otherwise or where we failed to provide the service.
• Submitting false or altered payment proof is grounds for immediate termination.

5. Alerts and delivery

Alerts are delivered over Telegram. Delivery therefore depends on your phone, your mobile network, your bank's SMS service and Telegram — none of which we control. We work hard to make delivery reliable, we retry failures automatically, and we notify you when something could not be sent, but we cannot guarantee that every message will be parsed or delivered.

Bank SMS formats change without notice. When that happens we update the app, but there may be a period during which affected messages are not recognised.

6. Acceptable use

You agree to use the service lawfully, including under Ethiopian telecommunications, privacy and consumer-protection rules. You must not:

• use the service to commit or facilitate fraud, or to present an alert as proof of a payment that did not occur;
• forward another person's financial information without a lawful basis for doing so;
• reverse engineer, decompile or extract source code, except to the extent the law permits;
• circumvent subscription checks, device binding, rate limits or any other technical or security measure;
• share one subscription across multiple businesses or devices;
• attempt to damage, disable, overload or gain unauthorised access to our systems or those of Telegram or any bank.

7. Your responsibilities as the account owner

You decide which Telegram chats receive alerts and which branch rules apply. That means you decide who in your organisation sees your incoming payments. Make sure the people you connect are entitled to see that information, remove staff who leave, and review your routing rules when your business changes. We deliver alerts to the destinations configured on your account and are not responsible for who you choose to include.

8. Sales partners

If you hold a Partner & Sales Portal account, additional terms apply: commission is earned when a customer's first subscription payment is verified, never when a trial starts; commission is calculated on our published rate at the time of the payment; and payouts follow the request, approval and payment workflow in the portal. We may withhold commission on registrations that turn out to be fraudulent, duplicated or self-referred.

9. Intellectual property

Fetan SMS, the Fetan name and marks, the platform and all related materials are owned by Fetan Technologies or its licensors. We grant you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable, revocable licence to use the app on your device for your own business purposes, subject to these Terms. You may not copy, modify, distribute, sell, sublicense or lease the app or the service except as the law allows or we agree in writing.

The transaction data produced from your own bank messages belongs to you.

10. Third parties

The service depends on your device, your mobile carrier, your bank's SMS service, Google Play and Telegram. Those parties operate under their own terms and privacy policies, and we are not responsible for their services, fees, availability or decisions.

11. Disclaimer

The service is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent permitted by law we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. We do not warrant that the service will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that every bank message will be parsed or every alert delivered.

12. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent permitted by law, Fetan Technologies and its suppliers are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, nor for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data, lost goodwill or business interruption, arising from your use of or inability to use the service — including a deposit alert that was delayed, missed or misrouted.

Our total aggregate liability for any claim arising out of these Terms or the service is limited to the amount you paid us for the service in the twelve months before the claim arose, or zero if you paid nothing. Where local law does not allow these limits, our liability is limited to the maximum that law permits.

13. Indemnity

You agree to defend and indemnify Fetan Technologies and its personnel against claims, damages, losses and reasonable expenses arising from your use of the service, your breach of these Terms, or your infringement of a third party's rights — including claims by people whose financial information you chose to forward.

14. Suspension and termination

We may suspend or terminate access if you breach these Terms, if we are required to by law, or for genuine operational or security reasons. Where circumstances allow, we will give notice and an opportunity to put things right.

You may stop using the service at any time by uninstalling the app, which immediately ends all SMS reading on your device. To have your account and data deleted, see Request data deletion. Sections that by their nature should survive termination — intellectual property, disclaimers, limitation of liability, indemnity and governing law — will do so.

15. Changes

We may update these Terms. The date at the top reflects the current version, and material changes will be notified in the app or on this site. Continuing to use the service after a change takes effect means you accept it; if you do not, stop using the service.

16. Governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, without regard to conflict-of-law rules, and the courts of Ethiopia have jurisdiction — except where mandatory consumer protections in your own country apply to you.

17. Contact

For questions about these Terms, reach us through the support channel in the Fetan SMS app or through our official Telegram bot. Our Contact page lists every way to reach us. For privacy matters, see our Privacy Policy.