Terms of Service

1. Who you are agreeing with

These Terms are a contract between you and Sikivu Limited, a company incorporated in Kenya, registration number PVT-5M19MV8Z, with its registered office at Nyaura Estate, Menyinkwa–University Road, Kisii Central, Kisii County. "Sikivu", "we" and "us" mean Sikivu Limited. By creating an account you accept these Terms and our Privacy Policy. We record the date and the version you accepted. Accepting electronically has the same effect as signing on paper.

2. Sikivu is not a medical service

• ·Sikivu Coach, the AI companion, gives supportive responses. It is software, not a therapist.
• ·Screening questionnaires (PHQ-9, GAD-7) give a score and a severity band. They are a starting point, not a diagnosis.
• ·Peers are other users, not professionals.
• ·Crisis detection is automated. It can miss a crisis or flag one that is not there.

If you are in immediate danger, call 999. Befrienders Kenya is open Mon–Sun 09:00–17:00 EAT, and Sikivu shows its number whenever the line is open. Childline Kenya (for minors) is on 116. These resources are always free in Sikivu and never behind a paywall.

3. Who may use Sikivu

You must be 18 or older. We ask for your date of birth and refuse accounts under 18. You must give accurate information, hold one account only, and not use Sikivu for anyone else without their knowledge and consent. You must not have been removed from Sikivu before for breaking these Terms. If we learn a user is under 18, we pause the account and follow the steps in our Privacy Policy.

4. Your account

You sign in with a one-time code sent to your email address. On the mobile app you may also verify a phone number. Keep your email secure; you are responsible for what happens under your account. Tell us at once at legal@sikivu.app if you think it has been compromised.

Invites. You can share an invite link from the Invite screen. If someone joins through your link, we record that they used your code and show you how many people have joined, never who, and Sikivu does not tell them that the link was yours. Anyone who joins through a link accepts these Terms and the Privacy Policy like any other user. An invite earns you no reward, discount or other benefit. Do not send invite links in bulk or to people who have not asked for one; Section 9 applies to how you share them. Sending a link tells the person you send it to that you use Sikivu, so share it only with someone you are happy to have know that. The Privacy Policy says what we keep about invites and for how long.

5. Sikivu Coach

• ·Coach is available on the free plan and on every paid plan. Your plan sets how many messages you may send each day and how far back Coach reads: free, 10 messages a day with a 5-message memory; Premium, 50 a day with a 50-message memory; Pro, unlimited messages with a 500-message memory.
• ·Every message and reply is stored in your account, on every plan.
• ·To write each reply, your message, the recent conversation and the automated labels described in our Privacy Policy are sent to our AI provider in the United States. Your name and profile are not.
• ·Coach may point you to crisis resources where your safety requires it.
• ·Do not rely on Coach for medical, legal or financial decisions, or treat anything it says as professional advice.

6. Peer support

Peer matching connects you with another user in a private room. By using it you agree that:

• ·You will treat what the other person shares as confidential, and not screenshot, copy or repeat it outside the room. We can suspend or remove a member who breaks this. We cannot guarantee that another member will keep this promise, so share accordingly.
• ·The other person sees your display name, avatar, what you chose to share in your peer profile, and what you write.
• ·Before a message is sent, it is checked on your device for profanity and for personal details such as phone numbers and email addresses. You may edit or cancel it; on the web you may also send it anyway. Repeated overrides are recorded for safety review.
• ·Sikivu staff tools do not show one-to-one peer messages.
• ·You can block, mute or report another user at any time.
• ·Peer messages are not included in your data copy, because they hold another person’s words. You can ask us for your own messages with the other person’s removed.

Sikivu Circles (small-group support with a Steward) is not yet available. When it opens, these terms apply to every member of a group, and we will ask you to accept them before you join.

7. Crisis features and emergency contacts

• ·Crisis features are always available free of charge, whatever your plan.
• ·They may suggest crisis helplines or emergency services for your country.
• ·They are not an emergency service. If you are in immediate danger, contact emergency services directly.

You may add emergency contacts and build a safety plan. You are responsible for having each contact's agreement to be named.

Emergency contacts. If you nominate emergency contacts and Sikivu detects that you may be in crisis, we send each contact you have allowed to receive crisis alerts a short text message or email asking them to reach out to you. The alert never includes anything you wrote. It includes your name, so the contact knows who it is about, and part of your phone number if you have one on file. If we have no name for you, or you told an earlier version of the app not to share your name, it refers to you as "Someone", with the last four digits of your phone number if you have one on file. If you gave that answer, you can change it in your emergency contacts settings. We tell you in the app when we have tried to reach them. You can stop alerts to any contact, or to all of your contacts, in settings.

Each contact you add is allowed to receive alerts unless you turn that off. Alerts are sent automatically when our software records a crisis or a screening result is in the highest-risk band; no person reviews them first. They are a safety net, not an emergency service.

Alerts travel by text message or email through other companies (Africa's Talking and Resend). A provider can accept a message that never reaches your contact, or reaches them late, so we cannot promise that any alert will arrive.

8. Your content

What you write in Sikivu belongs to you. You give us a licence to store and process it and show it to you, and to the peers you choose, in order to provide the service. We do not sell it. Using it to improve our AI is optional and has its own switch in Profile → Privacy, and our Privacy Policy explains what turning it off can and cannot undo. We also count mood entries in anonymous community trends, shown only for groups of at least 10 people. Section 9 of the Privacy Policy lists every service provider that processes your data, including PostHog (product analytics) and Sentry (error monitoring).

Weekly reflections. Once a week, if you logged any mood check-ins, we use our AI provider, Anthropic, to write you a short reflection from that week's check-ins, including any notes you added. It appears in the app. We also email you a short notice that it is ready, with a link and none of its content. If you have a phone number on file, we may send a text reminder alongside that email, outside your quiet hours. You can turn off the text reminder in notification settings.

AI analysis of your entries. This is part of the core of Sikivu and has no switch. If you are 18 or over, we send a journal entry, mood note or Coach message to our AI provider, Anthropic, which writes a short reflection and picks out themes and feelings, each with a quote from your text. If an entry looks like it may put you at risk, we show you crisis contacts, write no reflection for it, and a member of our clinical team may read it to decide whether to act. Nobody reads entries as you write them, a review is not a promise that we will contact you, and Sikivu is not an emergency service. We limit how many analyses an account can request, and keep a log of the time of each request, without any of your text, for two days to apply that limit. The only way to stop it is to delete your account. You can correct or remove what an analysis picked out about you in Journal → What I've noticed.

Content in a peer room is also the other participant's record of the conversation.

9. Acceptable use

You agree not to:

• ·Use Sikivu unlawfully
• ·Harass, threaten or exploit another user
• ·Ask a peer for personal contact details, money or sexual content
• ·Post content that encourages self-harm or suicide, or that shares another person’s personal details
• ·Advertise, recruit or promote anything to another user
• ·Impersonate anyone
• ·Try to access another account or our systems
• ·Scrape, reverse-engineer or automate interaction with the service
• ·Upload malicious code
• ·Use Sikivu to provide services to third parties

We may act on reports and on what our safety systems detect.

10. Plans, payment and donations

• ·Free plan. Mood tracking, screening, Coach within the free allowance, peer support, and every crisis feature.
• ·Premium and Pro. Higher Coach allowances and memory, and other features shown in the app. Prices are shown before you pay and may differ by country under purchasing-power-parity pricing.
• ·Payment. Web payments are taken by Pesapal (M-Pesa and cards) in Kenyan shillings (KES). iOS and Android subscriptions are billed by Apple or Google under their terms and managed through RevenueCat. We never see your card number.
• ·Renewal and cancellation. App Store and Google Play subscriptions renew automatically until you cancel in the store before the renewal date. Cancelling stops the next charge and keeps access until the period ends. A web subscription renews automatically each month or year through a standing order set up with Pesapal, until you turn auto-renewal off. We ask you to agree to the amount and the period before you pay. You can turn auto-renewal off, and back on, at any time in Settings under Billing. Turning it off stops us extending your access and it ends at the close of the period you have paid for. It does not by itself stop your payment provider taking a charge that is already scheduled, and if one is taken after you turn auto-renewal off, we review it for a refund.
• ·When a paid plan ends. If you do not renew, you move to the free plan about three days after the paid period ends. Nothing is deleted because of the move: your conversations, check-ins and other records stay, and Coach reads back only as far as the free plan allows (section 5). Crisis features are not affected.
• ·Refunds follow the policy of the platform you paid through (Apple App Store, Google Play or Pesapal).
• ·Price changes take effect at your next renewal after we tell you.
• ·Donations through sikivu.app are gifts to Sikivu Limited and do not buy a plan.
• ·Nothing you pay for affects crisis features, which stay free for everyone.

11. Availability and changes

Sikivu is in early access. Features may be incomplete, may change, and may be withdrawn while we learn from our first users. We aim to keep Sikivu available but cannot guarantee uninterrupted service, and we may suspend it for maintenance. Crisis resources stay reachable in the web app without a network connection.

We will tell you about material changes to these Terms in the app or by email at least 30 days before they take effect, unless a change is needed sooner to meet the law or to protect someone's safety. Continuing to use Sikivu after that date is acceptance of the changed Terms. If you do not accept a change, you can close your account before it takes effect (section 12). Where a change needs your consent, we ask for it. Earlier versions are available on request at legal@sikivu.app.

Neither of us is liable for a delay or failure caused by something beyond our reasonable control, such as a power or network failure, a failure of a payment, messaging or cloud provider, or a natural disaster, war or government action. This does not remove any right you have as a consumer and does not excuse a payment you already owe.

12. Ending your account

You may delete your account at any time in Profile → Your data on the web app, or by writing to privacy@sikivu.app. We hold the account for 30 days in case you change your mind, then delete it and everything linked to it, as our Privacy Policy describes.

We may suspend or end your account for a serious or repeated breach of these Terms, with notice unless immediate action is needed to protect another user or the service. We may also suspend an account while we look into a safety report or a suspected compromise. Crisis resources stay available to a suspended account. If we close Sikivu altogether, we will give you at least 30 days to ask for a copy of your data.

13. Intellectual property

Sikivu's name, design, software, prompts and content are ours or our licensors'. We give you a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use the app for your own personal use while your account is open; it ends when your account closes. You may not copy or modify Sikivu, reverse-engineer it, extract its prompts, or use Coach's replies to train or build another AI model. Your content stays yours.

Feedback. If you send us ideas or comments through the feedback form or the contact form, we may use them to improve Sikivu without payment or credit. This covers only the feedback itself, never what you write in Coach, in your check-ins or in a peer room.

14. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

Sikivu is provided as is and as available. To the extent Kenyan law allows, we exclude implied warranties, including fitness for a particular purpose.

Coach replies, weekly reflections and screening scores are produced by software. They can be wrong, incomplete or unsuitable for you, and we do not promise that they are accurate.

Sikivu relies on other companies, including payment providers, app stores, messaging and email providers, and our AI provider. We are not responsible for their outages or errors beyond what the law requires. The helplines named in Sikivu are run by independent organisations whose hours and numbers can change; we do not run them.

To the extent Kenyan law allows, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, and our total liability to you for all claims in any 12-month period is limited to the amount you paid us in that period, or KES 5,000 if you paid nothing.

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

15. Law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of Kenya. If you have a complaint, write to legal@sikivu.app first and we will try to resolve it within 30 days. Failing that, the courts of Kenya have jurisdiction. You may also complain to the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner in Kenya about how we handle your personal data. Nothing in these Terms removes rights you have as a consumer under Kenyan law.

16. Notices and contact

Legal notices to us: legal@sikivu.app, or by post to Sikivu Limited, P.O. Box 69, 40111 Pap-Onditi, Kenya. Notices to you: the email address on your account or a message in the app. You can also use our contact form. Support is not a crisis service and replies are not immediate; in an emergency, see section 2.

17. General

If a clause is unenforceable, the rest stands. Our failure to enforce a right is not a waiver. You may not transfer these Terms; we may transfer them to a successor who takes on our obligations, and we will tell you if we do. These Terms and the Privacy Policy are the whole agreement between us about Sikivu. These Terms create no partnership or agency between us, and nobody else, including a peer or an emergency contact, can enforce them. Sections 8, 12, 13, 14 and 15 continue after your account closes.