Bring your own credentials. Keep ownership. That's the contract.
Nerve provides high-throughput notification infrastructure as a service. You bring your own provider credentials (Termii, Sendchamp, Infobip, Postmark, SendGrid, FCM, APNs, Meta WhatsApp). You retain exclusive ownership of your recipient records, message payloads, and template definitions. Nerve operates the ingest gateway, priority queues, circuit breakers, and delivery orchestration.
Acceptable use is strictly enforced: consented recipients only, adherence to Nigerian NCC 2442 DND regulations, and lawful transactional communications. Accounts distributing unsolicited bulk messaging, fraudulent traffic, or deceptive OTPs are suspended at the edge gateway.
Billing operates on a flat monthly BYO subscription (₦50,000 / month) providing 100 RPS throughput and 500,000 monthly events. If payment fails, a 7-day grace period applies before fallback to the free tier (1 RPS, 1,000 events/month) and eventual workspace suspension.
Your users’ PII never touches plain logs or permanent disk.
Nerve implements strict data minimisation under the Nigeria Data Protection Act (NDPA 2023) and the General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR). Recipient phone numbers and email addresses are never written to plain application logs or analytical stores.
Sensitive variable values (one-time passwords, verification codes, account numbers, and personal balances) are held in volatile memory exclusively during message dispatch and are NEVER written to the database or long-term storage. Only a SHA-256 hash and variable keys are retained for 7 days to enable template debugging.
Retention is enforced nightly by automated database jobs: message metadata and chronological event timelines are permanently purged after 90 days; user sessions expire after 30 days of inactivity (hard 90-day cap); regulatory audit logs are retained for 2 years. Under NDPA Sections 34–37, subscribers have the right to access export (GET /console/subscribers/{id}/export) and complete erasure (DELETE /v1/subscribers/{id}).
Standard contractual clauses and authorized sub-processors.
This Data Processing Agreement (DPA) governs all personal data processed by Nerve on behalf of the customer. The customer acts as Data Controller; Nerve acts as Data Processor. Nerve processes personal data solely in accordance with documented customer instructions through API requests and dashboard configurations.
Nerve maintains robust technical and organisational security measures: AES-256-GCM envelope encryption for all provider credentials using per-workspace Data Encryption Keys (DEKs) wrapped under a master Key Encryption Key (KEK); constant-time cryptographic verification of API tokens and session headers; and PostgreSQL Row-Level Security (RLS) guaranteeing strict tenant boundary isolation.
Customer authorizes the following infrastructure sub-processors: (1) Hetzner Online GmbH (Compute, Falkenstein, Germany); (2) Cloudflare, Inc. (Edge network, DNS, R2 encrypted backup archives, Global); (3) Paystack Payments Limited (Merchant billing and card tokenisation, Lagos, Nigeria); (4) Grafana Labs (OTel telemetry metrics and traces, Frankfurt, Germany); (5) Neon, Inc. (Ephemeral CI build verification only, USA); plus any upstream notification providers explicitly configured by the customer.
Primary storage in Germany. Nigerian in-country migration ready.
Nerve’s primary production datastore and compute clusters reside in Falkenstein, Germany (Hetzner CPX41). Cross-border transfer of data from Nigeria to Germany is fully lawful under NDPA 2023 Part VI (Sections 41–43), as the European Union GDPR framework provides recognized adequate protection, reinforced by our binding DPA.
For regulated Nigerian financial institutions, tier-1 banks, and government bodies requiring physical in-country data residency, Nerve has architected and costed a dedicated Nigerian PostgreSQL deployment path. Documented in infrastructure/RESIDENCY.md, this option provides local data storage in Tier-3 Lagos data centers (MDXi Lekki or Rack Centre Ikeja) with an SLA lead time of 2 to 3 weeks upon contract execution.
When enterprise compliance demands in-country storage, you receive a concrete engineering migration plan and fixed pricing rather than ambiguity.
Measured latency and uptime commitments.
Nerve guarantees 99.9% monthly availability for the public ingestion API (api.nervly.io). Enqueue latency is benchmarked with measured headroom: p50 is 1.48ms and p99 is 3.45ms under nominal load on production hardware, well within our 50ms contractual ceiling.
Per-tenant-per-provider circuit breakers isolate upstream failures: if a provider error rate exceeds 50% over a 30-second window, traffic automatically fails over to the next configured provider in your priority cascade without manual intervention.
Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is under 30 minutes (measured at 18m 42s in full rebuild drills); Recovery Point Objective (RPO) is under 15 minutes backed by continuous WAL archiving to Cloudflare R2. System health is publicly verifiable at status.nervly.io.
Zero trust. Encrypted at rest and in transit. Audited perimeter.
All network communication is TLS 1.3 encrypted. Host firewalls restrict inbound ports strictly to 22 (SSH pubkey only), 80 (ACME HTTP), and 443 (HTTPS TLS). PostgreSQL port 5432 and Redis port 6379 are bound exclusively to the private container network and are never published to host interfaces.
Provider secrets are envelope-encrypted at rest and decrypted in-memory only during provider calls; zero plaintext credentials can leak from any console or API endpoint. Zero-secret logging is verified by continuous automated test suites preventing API keys, session tokens, passwords, KEK, or payload variables from appearing in log streams.
Cross-origin requests to api.nervly.io disallow credentials by policy. Every management mutation creates an immutable entry in the workspace audit log.
SUMMARY FOR ORIENTATION ONLY — SIGNED AGREEMENTS GOVERN. QUESTIONS → LEGAL@NERVLY.IO