Terms of Service

Draft for legal review. This document is a working draft. It has not yet been reviewed by a lawyer and is not yet in force. Details in square brackets, like [Company legal name], will be filled in before launch.

1. About these terms

These Terms of Service (“Terms”) are an agreement between you and [Company legal name], a company registered in Nigeria with RC number [RC number], whose registered address is [Registered address] (“Amara”, “we”, “us”). They cover the Amara mobile app, the website at amaradating.com and everything you can do in them (together, the “Service”).

By creating an account or using the Service, you agree to these Terms, our Community Guidelines and our Privacy Policy. If you don’t agree, please don’t use Amara.

Nothing in these Terms takes away rights you have under Nigerian law that cannot be taken away by contract, including your rights under the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act 2018 and the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023.

2. Who can use Amara

To use Amara you must:

• be 18 or older. We check your date of birth when you sign up, and we remove accounts of anyone we believe is under 18;
• be able to enter a binding contract under Nigerian law;
• not have been banned from Amara before, and not be prohibited from using the Service under any law that applies to you;
• not have been convicted of a sexual offence or a violent crime, or be required to register as a sex offender anywhere;
• have only one account.

3. Your account

Signing in. You can sign in with your phone number (we text you a 6-digit code), or with Google or Apple. Phone numbers without a country code are treated as Nigerian.

Keeping it safe. You’re responsible for what happens on your account. Don’t share your sign-in codes with anyone, ever. Amara staff will never ask you for a code. Each device you sign in on is a separate session, and you can see and sign out of your devices in Settings.

Accurate information. Give accurate information when you sign up and keep it up to date. Your date of birth is locked once you finish setting up your profile; if it’s wrong, contact us at [support email].

4. Your profile and what you post

It must be you. Your photos must be real, recent photos of you. Your profile must not pretend to be someone else.

Profile rules. You need at least 3 photos, and up to 6. Profile text (your name, bio and prompt answers) may not include phone numbers, links, email addresses or social media handles. This is a common way scammers pull people off the app, so we block it.

Photo checks. Every photo is checked after you upload it. A photo that may break our rules is shown only to you until a moderator reviews it. If it breaks the rules, we remove it from your profile. We strip location and other hidden data (EXIF) from every photo before anyone else can see it.

Your content stays yours. You own what you post. You give us a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to store, process, resize, display and share your content inside the Service, so that we can run Amara for you and other members. This licence ends when your content is deleted, except where we keep a copy as explained in our Privacy Policy (for example, evidence in a safety report).

We don’t use your photos to advertise. We won’t use your photos or profile in advertising outside the Service without asking you first.

5. Face verification

Verifying your face is optional. It doesn’t change who can see your profile or what you can do on Amara, but it shows other members that you match your photos. You take a short live video selfie in the app. We check that a real, live person is in front of the camera, then compare your face with your profile photos.

• If both checks pass, your profile gets a verified badge.
• If we can’t be sure, you can try again with clearer photos. You can make up to 5 attempts a day.
• We may ask you to verify again, for example after a report, or if we have reason to think the account may not belong to the person in the photos. Until you do, your profile doesn’t show the verified badge.

Our Privacy Policy explains what we keep from this check. In short: we keep the result and scores, never the video or images.

6. How Amara works

Visibility. Other members can see your profile only when you have finished setting it up, have at least 3 approved photos, and your profile is not paused or hidden by our moderation team. You don’t have to verify your face to be seen.

Intent. You tell us what you’re looking for: something serious, open to see, short-term fun or new friends. We use this to show you people whose goals fit with yours.

Discovery. We suggest profiles based on what you and the other person are each looking for (gender, age, distance and intent), how active and complete profiles are, and shared interests. Both of you must fit each other’s age range, gender and distance settings. ‘Show people further away if I run out’ is on unless you turn it off, and ‘slightly outside my age range’ is off unless you turn it on. With either on, once you run out we may show you people a little beyond your own settings, but never beyond theirs. We also spread attention so the same few profiles aren’t shown to everyone.

Matches. When two people like each other, it’s a match. A match ends after 7 days if neither of you writes, and either of you can unmatch at any time, which ends the conversation for both of you.

Chat safety. To protect you:

• phone numbers, links, social handles and photos unlock only after you have each sent 3 messages;
• we may ask “Are you sure?” before sending a message that looks insulting;
• messages that ask for money or try to move you off the app are delivered with a warning to the person receiving them, and messages with threats are sent to our moderation team.

These checks are automatic and won’t catch everything. Please use your judgement too.

7. Your safety

We work hard to keep Amara safe, but we can’t guarantee how any member will behave, on or off the app. We do not run criminal background checks on members. Face verification is optional, so not every member has a verified badge. Where someone has one, it shows that they matched their photos; it doesn’t tell you who they are or whether they are safe to meet.

You are responsible for your own interactions with other members. Read our safety tips in the Safety Center in the app and on our Safety page. If you meet someone, you can use Share My Date to text the details of your plan to someone you trust.

If you are in danger, call 112 (or 767 in Lagos) before you contact us.

8. Rules of conduct

You must follow our Community Guidelines. In particular, you must not:

• ask any member for money, gifts, airtime, transport fare, loans, investments or cryptocurrency, or run any kind of scam;
• threaten, harass, blackmail or intimidate anyone, or share or threaten to share intimate images;
• post nudity or sexual content in photos, or hate speech anywhere;
• impersonate anyone, or use photos that aren’t of you;
• use Amara to advertise, sell or recruit, including for sex work;
• use bots, scrapers or other automated tools, try to get around our safety features, or interfere with the Service;
• do anything illegal.

9. Reports, moderation and enforcement

Reporting. You can report a profile, a photo or a message. Reporting someone also blocks them for you, and keeps a copy of the conversation for our team.

Review. Reports are reviewed by people on our moderation team, most urgent first. Some decisions are automatic: for example, a profile is hidden from new people while we review it if it is reported by 3 different verified members within 24 hours, or once if someone reports that the person may be under 18.

What we can do. Depending on what happened, we may:

1. send you a warning;
2. restrict your account for 7 or 30 days (your profile is hidden from new people, but your existing matches still work);
3. suspend your account for 24 hours, 72 hours, 7 days or 30 days;
4. ban your account permanently. When we ban an account, we keep a protected (hashed) record of its phone number, email and Google or Apple ID so the person can’t sign up again.

We may skip steps when the harm is serious, such as threats, scams, sexual content involving anyone under 18, or sextortion. We may also remove content, end matches, or ask you to verify again.

Appeals. If your account is restricted, suspended or banned, you can appeal once for each decision, in the app. A different member of our team reviews your appeal. If we overturn the decision, we lift it.

Law enforcement. We may share information with the police or other authorities where the law requires it or where someone’s life or safety is at risk, as explained in our Privacy Policy.

10. Paid features

Amara’s core features are free: creating a profile, verifying, seeing profiles, liking, matching and chatting. Some extras cost money.

Plans

Plans come in 1-week, 1-month and 6-month lengths.

Packs

You can also buy packs of Roses, Boosts and Super Likes. Your weekly Super Likes are used before the ones you bought. Packs don’t expire while your account is open, have no cash value, can’t be transferred or exchanged for money, and are lost if your account is deleted or banned.

Prices and how you pay

The price is always shown before you pay.

• Through the Apple App Store or Google Play, you pay the price the store shows. Those purchases are also covered by Apple’s or Google’s terms.
• When you pay Amara directly, our payment provider takes the payment. The price shown includes VAT, and it is the price you pay.
• Your plan works on every device you sign in on, wherever you bought it.
• We may change prices. A price change never applies to a plan you already have; it applies only when you buy again.

Auto-renewal

Plans renew automatically at the end of each period, at the same price and for the same length, until you cancel. When you pay Amara directly, we ask you to agree to auto-renewal before you pay, we send a reminder 3 days before a 1-month or 6-month plan renews, and we send a receipt after each payment.

If a renewal payment to Amara fails, we give you a short grace period of 3 days to pay. If it still hasn’t been paid by then, your plan ends. If a renewal through the App Store or Google Play fails, the store’s own rules apply.

Cancelling

• Paid to Amara directly: cancel in Amara under Settings › Plan and purchases. It takes one tap. Your plan stops renewing and lasts until the end of the period you’ve paid for.
• Paid through the App Store or Google Play: cancel in your Apple or Google account’s subscription settings. We can’t cancel store subscriptions for you.

Deleting your account stops renewals of plans paid to Amara directly, but it doesn’t cancel store subscriptions. Cancel those in the store first.

Refunds

• Paid to Amara directly: except where the law requires otherwise, payments are not refundable and we don’t give refunds or credits for unused parts of a period. If you believe you were charged in error, or something went wrong with your purchase, contact us at [support email] within [number] days and we will look into it fairly.
• Store purchases: refunds are handled by Apple or Google under their own policies. Please ask them directly.
• When a refund is made (by us, Apple or Google), the plan ends at once, or the items from the pack are taken back (we never take your balance below zero). A chargeback or card dispute that you win counts as a refund.

We may also refund you, or end a plan, where we have to by law or where we close an account for breaking these Terms (in which case no refund is due unless the law says otherwise).

11. Pausing and deleting your account

Pause. You can pause your profile at any time. You’ll be hidden from discovery, but you keep your matches and conversations.

Delete. You can delete your account in the app (Settings → Delete account) or on the website at amaradating.com/account/delete. We ask you to confirm with a code we text you (or by signing in again with Google or Apple).

When you delete your account, you’re hidden straight away and signed out on every device. If you sign back in within 30 days, your account is restored. After 30 days, we permanently erase your account, as explained in our Privacy Policy.

12. Changes to the Service and to these Terms

Amara is still growing, and we may add, change or remove features. If we make a change to these Terms that affects you materially, we will tell you in the app or by text at least [number] days before it takes effect, unless the change is needed sooner for safety or legal reasons. If you keep using Amara after the change, the new Terms apply. If you don’t agree, you can delete your account.

13. Our intellectual property

The Amara name, logo, app, website and their content (other than what members post) belong to us or our licensors. You may use them only to use the Service as intended. Please don’t copy, change, reverse-engineer or resell any part of the Service.

14. Disclaimers

We provide the Service “as is” and “as available”. To the extent the law allows, we don’t promise that the Service will always be available, error-free or secure, or that you will find a match. We are not responsible for what members say or do, on or off the app, though we will act on reports as described in these Terms.

15. Limitation of liability

To the extent the law allows:

• we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profits, data or opportunity;
• our total liability to you for any claim is limited to the greater of the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim, or [amount in NGN].

Nothing in these Terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot be limited under Nigerian law.

16. Indemnity

If you break these Terms or the law, and someone brings a claim against us because of it, you agree to cover our reasonable costs of dealing with that claim, to the extent the law allows.

17. Ending this agreement

You can stop using Amara and delete your account at any time. We may suspend or close your account if you break these Terms or our Community Guidelines, if the law requires it, or if we stop offering the Service (in which case we will give you reasonable notice and refund any unused part of a plan you paid Amara for directly).

18. Disputes and governing law

These Terms are governed by the laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. If you have a complaint, please contact us first at [support email]; most problems can be sorted out quickly. If we can’t resolve it, the courts of [Lagos State, Nigeria] will have jurisdiction, without affecting any right you have to go to a consumer protection body such as the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission.

19. General

• If any part of these Terms can’t be enforced, the rest still applies.
• If we don’t enforce a right straight away, we haven’t given it up.
• You can’t transfer your account or these Terms to anyone else. We may transfer these Terms to a company that takes over the Service, and your rights won’t be reduced as a result.
• These Terms, the Community Guidelines and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about the Service.

20. Contact us

[Company legal name] [Registered address] RC number: [RC number] Email: [support email]