Terms of service

Who we are and what this covers

The legal entity, the services in scope, and the countries the terms apply in.

We operate the Afër app and the website at afer.app. Afër is operated by a limited liability company registered in the United States. These terms apply every time you open the app, browse the site, or use the merchant app or the driver app. They cover rides, food orders, store orders and marketplace listings, the wallet that pays for all of them, and the support and dispute process behind them.

Afër is the platform, not the seller. When a restaurant, a store or an individual seller sells you something, your contract for that item is with them. We run the app, show you the price and the fee before you commit, hold the money until the job is done, and handle the case if something goes wrong. A ride works the same way: we arrange it, the driver performs it.

We open country by country and city by city, so what you can order depends on where you are, and a service that runs in one place may not run in the next yet. The app is on iOS and Android. These terms apply wherever we operate, and they sit alongside our privacy notice and the separate pages on inspections and refunds.

Your account

Eligibility, phone verification, one account per person, and when we can suspend or close one.

You need one account, and it has to be yours. You sign up with your own phone number, we send a code to verify it, and that number identifies you across every service in the app. You must be 18 or older to hold an Afër account, in the customer app, the merchant app and the driver app alike. Keep your name, number and payment details current, because a stale number is how a delivery reaches the wrong door. One person, one account.

• we close an account when we confirm fraud, and the trust score goes to zero with it
• we suspend a driver whose license, registration, insurance or ID has expired, until the replacement is reviewed
• a merchant outlet stays pending, and cannot advertise, until its documents pass review
• we can suspend an account while we look into conduct covered further down this page
• you can close your own account from Settings, whenever you want

Closing your account removes your profile and your personal data. Transaction records we are legally required to keep stay, without your contact details attached. Before you go, you can export everything you have given us in a machine-readable file, also from Settings. If we are still holding money for an open case or an unfinished order, we finish that first and then close the account.

Using the marketplace

What may be listed, what may not, and that a sale is a contract between neighbors, not with Afër.

A marketplace sale is a deal between two people. The contract is between the buyer and the seller, Afër is not a party to it, and we take no commission on a neighbor-to-neighbor sale. That cuts both ways: you keep the full price, and you carry the responsibility for describing the item honestly, using real photos, and handing over what you advertised.

• anything the law where you are forbids
• counterfeits, and copies sold as the real thing
• live animals
• services that need a license you cannot produce
• alcohol, tobacco and vaping products
• prescription medicines, and anything sold as a medical treatment
• weapons, ammunition and the parts that make them
• adult material, and any service of a sexual nature
• gambling, betting and lottery tickets
• gift cards, prepaid value, currency and crypto assets

Keep the conversation in the app. Chat stays inside Afër, phone numbers are masked, and a meetup you agree on attaches to the listing so there is a record of what was arranged. The app lists safe meeting spots: public places, well lit, some with cameras. If a buyer wants the item checked before paying, they can order an inspection, which the next-but-one section explains.

A listing you publish is public. Anyone with its link can open it, and search engines such as Google may show it in their results. It shows the item: the title, the photos, the price, the description, the condition and the town. It never shows your name, your phone number or your exact location, and contact details written in the description are hidden. A listing that is sold or removed is taken down, and it drops out of search results as the search engines revisit it.

Orders, rides and bookings

How an order is formed, cancellations, and who is responsible for the goods or the trip.

An order is formed when the merchant accepts it, not the moment you tap. Until then nothing is prepared and nothing is settled: the money is held, not paid out. Restaurants and stores own their catalog, including items, prices, options and availability, and we do not mark their prices up. The delivery fee and the minimum order are on the store or restaurant card before you order. Once an order is accepted, a cancellation is handled as a case, and the amount stays held until it is decided.

A ride is quoted for the exact trip before you request it, and the price does not change on the way. If you add a stop, the app re-quotes first and you accept the new price. At pickup there is a waiting timer; when it runs out the driver may cancel the trip as a no-show and keep the waiting fee. SOS on the trip screen reaches our safety team with your live location, and route sharing sends a live link.

Who is responsible for what is simple. The restaurant or the store is responsible for the food and the goods, and for the condition they leave in. The driver or courier is responsible for the trip and for the package in transit. A seller is responsible for the item sold. We are responsible for the platform: the price you were shown, the money we hold, the record of what happened, and the case if you open one.

• grocery stores are required to list the stock they actually hold, at the price on their shelf
• an out-of-stock item is marked, not swapped for something else
• nothing is substituted without the customer's approval
• a restaurant's health certificate is shown on its card
• we suspend a listing once its certificate has lapsed, and restore it when a valid one is reviewed

Payments and the wallet

Prepaid balance, top-ups, single-use QR payments, fees shown at checkout.

Afër runs on one prepaid wallet. You top it up by card, and every service can be paid from the same balance: a ride, a dinner, a grocery order, a marketplace purchase. The ways to pay, including whether cash at the door is accepted, differ from country to country, and the app shows them before you confirm. A merchant can take payment in person by showing a single-use QR code in the merchant app, and that code works once.

• the delivery fee and the minimum order, on the restaurant or store card
• the ride price, before you request the ride
• the inspection fee, before you order the inspection
• the commission on an order, before the merchant accepts it
• the fee on a job, before the driver accepts it

Every payment leaves an itemized receipt in the wallet, with the fee shown separately, so you can see what went where. A refund goes back the way you paid: to the balance, usually within minutes of a decision, or to the card an order was charged to. Money you put into the balance cannot be withdrawn to a bank account; what you put in by card and have not spent can, on your request, be returned to that same card, never to another card or account. What you earn by selling, driving or delivering is paid to your own bank account where your market allows it. Merchants pay no monthly fee, no setup fee, and no commission on counter QR payments.

Trust score and inspections

How the score is calculated, what an inspection is and is not, and the limits of both.

Every profile carries a public score from 0 to 100 percent. It is built from identity verification, completed transactions, ratings, account age and passed inspections. Nobody edits their own score, and we do not raise one on request. Confirmed fraud sets it to zero and closes the account. The score describes a history. It is not a promise about the next transaction.

An inspection is optional, marketplace only, and the buyer asks for it. A trained inspector visits the seller and works through the checklist for the category: phones, vehicles, furniture, apartments. The output is a signed report with photos and findings. The fee is small, varies by category, and is shown before you request it. If the item fails, the buyer's held payment is refunded automatically.

A report records what the inspector found on that day, against that checklist. It is not a warranty, not a valuation, and not a legal certification of title or condition, and it does not make Afër the seller. A passed inspection and a high score both lower your risk. Neither removes it, and neither changes your right to open a case if the item is not what was described.

Prohibited conduct

Fraud, harassment, off-platform payments, scraping, and the consequences of each.

These rules apply to everyone in the app: buyers, sellers, riders, drivers, couriers and merchants. Most of them come down to one thing, which is that the person on the other side is a neighbor and the record of what happened has to stay honest. Breaking them costs you access to the app.

• fraud of any kind, including fake listings, staged damage and false claims
• harassment, threats, slurs or discrimination, in chat or in person
• pushing payment off the platform, which strips away the receipt, the hold and the case
• scraping listings, prices or scores, or driving the app with a script
• collecting or publishing someone's masked number, address or photos
• running more than one account, or using an account that is not yours

What happens next depends on what you did. A listing that breaks the rules comes down. A repeated problem suspends the account or the outlet. Confirmed fraud sets the score to zero and closes the account for good, and money held for a contested transaction stays held until the case is decided. We aim to reach a safety report within the hour, day or night, and we staff for that target, and they have no deadline.

Liability and disputes

The limits of our liability, the dispute process, governing law and how these terms change.

You have 14 days from the order, the ride or the purchase to open a case. Safety reports have no deadline, and neither does anything we are still holding money for. While a case is open the disputed amount is held, not settled, so nobody is paid out of a contested transaction. Both sides are heard, and the receipts, the status trail, in-app messages, trip records and any inspection report attach automatically.

A case ends in one of three ways: a refund, a redelivery, or a written reason for declining. If you disagree and have new information, a second agent reviews it once, and that review closes the case on our side. Refunds return to the wallet balance they were paid from, usually within minutes. You can keep three requests open at a time. Payments and refunds get an answer the same business day, everything else within one.

We are responsible for what we run: the price we showed you, the money we hold, the record of the transaction, and the case when you open one. We are not the restaurant, the store, the seller or the driver. We do not cook the food, own the goods or drive the car, and what we can put right for a transaction is the money in it, a redelivery, or a refund.

These terms are governed by the law of the state in which Afër is formed. Nothing in them removes a right you have under the law where you live, and nothing here affects the dispute rights you have with your card issuer, which run on their own rules and their own timetable. If that law gives you a stronger right, to a refund or to a remedy, or the right to take a matter to a court or a consumer body, that right stands, and our decision on a case does not touch it. When we change these terms, we publish the new version here with the date it takes effect.