Vol. 01 · No. 02
Summer 2026
The Founding Ten · now open Half price for two years
For UK charities & care providers

WhatsApp, on the record.

Your teams already run on WhatsApp. We move those conversations onto a number your organisation owns – same app, nothing to install, nothing to learn. Every message is captured into your own Microsoft 365, the place your email already lives, answerable the day an inspector, a relative or a tribunal asks.

Book a free risk audit See the founding offer
30-minute call · No pitch deck · We'll say if we're not the fit · Chair of a board? Ask for the one-page trustee briefing – no call needed
WhatsApp's official business service Archive in your own Microsoft 365 We cannot read your messages Disclosed, never covert Capturing in 14 days
PART 01 · THE EXPOSURE
The conversation we keep avoiding

Your organisation is already having the conversations. None of them are governed.

WhatsApp lives in your care homes, your frontline teams, your fundraising threads, your trustee chat. Your data protection lead knows. Whoever minds your IT has tried to stop it. The conversations happen anyway – just outside everything you bought to keep the organisation safe.

Then one morning it surfaces. A solicitor's letter asks for "all WhatsApp messages concerning my mother". A safeguarding review needs a thread that lives on the personal phone of someone who left in March. An inspector asks how handover decisions are recorded, and the only honest answer is "on people's own phones".

You can spend another year fighting the culture. Or you can govern the channel your people refuse to give up.

1 month
The statutory clock on a Subject Access Request. It starts the day the letter lands, whether or not you can search WhatsApp.
UK GDPR · Art. 12(3)
Reg 17
The CQC's good-governance rule: accurate, complete and contemporaneous records. Group chats about care are records.
Health & Social Care Act regs · care providers
Zero
Messages you can reliably produce from a leaver's personal phone once they walk out the door.
Ask your last three leavers
PART 02 · THE CHOICE
The usual three options

Three doors everyone tries. None of them hold.

Door 01 · Ban it

Write the policy. Send the memo.

The chats don't stop; they go quiet. Risk you could at least see becomes risk you can't, and the next incident arrives with "and they knew" attached to it.

Verdict · The risk goes dark
Door 02 · Replace it

Roll out the approved app.

Teams, Slack, a "secure messenger". Adoption lasts a fortnight, the night shift never moves, the families never join. Now you run two channels: one official and empty, one real and invisible. The lesson isn't that Teams is wrong – it's that families and the night shift will never live there.

Verdict · Two channels, one dark
Door 03 · Ignore it

Hope the letter never comes.

The cheapest option, right up until the morning it isn't. This strategy ends with a Subject Access Request, a tribunal order or an inspection finding – and it picks the date, not you.

Verdict · Works until it doesn't
The fourth door

Don't fight WhatsApp. Govern it.

Keep the app every member of staff, every volunteer and every family already uses. Move the conversations onto a number the charity owns. Capture everything, disclose everything, and be able to answer anything. Same habit, new ownership. And where door two asked everyone to move, this asks no one: families stay on WhatsApp while your office answers from Microsoft Teams – the system you already pay for.

The principle behind every feature we ship
PART 03 · THE MECHANISM
How it works

Four steps. Then it just runs.

STEP 01 · DAY ONE

Stand up a governed channel

A WhatsApp Business number your organisation owns – registered in your name with Meta, not in ours. Staff and families message it like any other contact – same app, nothing to install.

STEP 02 · WEEK TWO

Bring your people across

We set up your conversations, groups and invites, and supply the staff and family comms. You control membership from one page: one click in, instant removal when someone leaves. And your office answers from Microsoft Teams – families notice nothing.

STEP 03 · ALWAYS ON

Every message captured

Each message is captured, the moment it is sent, into your own Microsoft 365 – kept, held and searchable under the same rules as your email, using the Microsoft controls your IT lead already runs. Disclosed to members, never covert.

STEP 04 · THE DAY IT MATTERS

Search, hold, answer

Subject Access Requests, safeguarding evidence, retention and litigation holds – answered in hours, not weeks, over records that never left your organisation.

Contract to first captured conversation: fourteen days.
We do the heavy lifting · Your staff change nothing
Start the fourteen days
PART 04 · THE GROUPS
Three kinds of governed group

One number. Three kinds of group. Every word on the record.

Group 01 · Governed

The ordinary group, governed.

A WhatsApp group exactly as your people know it, running on the number your organisation owns. Meta caps these at eight members plus your number, and they need Meta's Official Business badge – we run that application for you, and it typically clears around week five.

Best for · Small teams & committees
Group 02 · Relay

Any size, from day one.

No cap, no badge, no waiting. Members message your organisation's number, and every text and photo is passed to everyone else under the sender's name – «Margaret»: … A board of fifteen or a home of eighty chats as one governed group, from the first morning.

Best for · Boards, families, whole homes
Group 03 · Teams-mapped

The group your office joins from Teams.

The same eight-member governed group, with one difference: it is mirrored into a thread in your Microsoft Teams channel. Carers and families chat on WhatsApp; office staff and managers read and reply from Teams. One conversation, two doors into it.

Best for · Handover & office-to-floor
And every one-to-one conversation works the same way: families message your number on WhatsApp, your office answers from Teams.
All three kinds · Captured · Archived · Even the gaps recorded
PART 05 · WHAT'S IN THE BOX
What's in the box

Built for the people who have to answer for it.

001 · Channel

A number your organisation owns

Conversations run on your organisation's WhatsApp Business number, not a volunteer's personal phone. The channel survives staff churn, phone upgrades and awkward exits.

002 · Membership

Joiners in, leavers out, instantly

Add and remove members from an easy-to-use admin page. When someone leaves, they're out of every governed group before they reach the car park. No more "who still has access to that chat".

003 · Archive

Every message, in your own Microsoft 365

Texts, photos, voice notes and documents – captured through WhatsApp's official channel into your own Microsoft 365, not ours. Your own rules for keeping, holding and searching govern WhatsApp from day one, and if you ever leave, there is nothing to hand back: the records were always yours.

004 · Inbox

Families on WhatsApp. Your office on Teams.

Relatives never download anything new – they message the home on WhatsApp as they always have. Office staff and managers answer from a named, threaded conversation inside Microsoft Teams, every word still archived. Staff who prefer the handset keep replying from WhatsApp.

005 · Groups

Groups of eight or eighty

WhatsApp's official rules cap an ordinary governed group at eight members plus your number. Relay groups aren't capped: each text or photo comes to your organisation's number and is re-sent to everyone else under the sender's name – «Margaret»: … – so a full board chats as one governed group, from day one.

006 · Gaps

Even the gaps leave a record

WhatsApp's rules sometimes hold a message back – a group gone quiet for more than a day, or a kind of message WhatsApp hasn't yet cleared for business numbers. When that happens, the attempt itself is recorded: who didn't receive it, when, and why. Your evidence trail covers what didn't arrive as well as what did.

007 · Respond

SARs answered in an afternoon

Search by the person asking, across every governed channel. Your own team redacts, packages and delivers inside the statutory month – ours on the call beside you if you want company. A workflow built around ICO guidance, for the person whose name goes on the response.

008 · Preserve

Holds that survive deletion

Messages are archived the instant they are sent – deleting a message in the app cannot claw it back out of the archive – and Microsoft 365 litigation hold preserves them through any purge attempt. A trustee-ready evidence trail.

009 · Protect

Nothing of yours to breach

No copy of any conversation ever exists with us – not for support, not for backup, not at all. A break-in at our end would surrender billing records, not messages. Your archive lives behind your own locks, and only yours.

PART 06 · THE FOUNDING OFFER
Ten places · opened June 2026

We're building this with ten organisations. Be one of them.

We're a young company with a strong opinion and a working product. We won't show you logos we don't have. What we need now is ten organisations who live this problem every day – and we're paying properly for the privilege.

Founding partners get the product at half price, the founders on a first-name basis, and a real say in what gets built next. In return we ask for the one thing money can't buy at this stage: your honest, public word that it works. And when the tenth place fills, this section comes off the page for good – the founding terms go with it.

Every founding place includes
  • Half price for two years, then today's list price locked for life
  • White-glove setup: your official WhatsApp Business number arranged and every group moved across, done for you
  • The trustee pack on day one: data protection impact assessment template, privacy notices, staff and family comms, board briefing
  • A named line to the founders and a vote on the roadmap
  • In exchange: a reference call and a case study, once we've earned them
Guarantee · In the contract

The Answerable Guarantee

If a Subject Access Request touches your governed channels and you can't produce the WhatsApp side within one working day, our team works it with you, free – your hands on the records, ours on the method. If it still can't be produced, we refund your year. The product has one job; this is us betting on it.

Exit · In the contract

The no-hostage clause

Leave whenever you like. The archive was always yours, in your own Microsoft 365 – there is nothing to hand back and barely anything to delete. We confirm in writing that the little we hold is gone, and there are no exit fees. If we're not earning the renewal, we shouldn't have it.

"A named line to the founders" is not a metaphor. I'm Terry Sullivan, I built this, and I read everything sent to enquiries@chat.org.uk myself. If you'd rather take our measure before booking anything, write to me directly.

Terry Sullivan · Founder, Chat Compliance · CISSP-certified in information security
Claim a founding place
30-minute call · No pitch deck · We'll say if we're not the fit
PART 07 · THE NUMBERS
Pricing

Pricing built for charities and care providers. No mystery line items.

Every number here is the number you pay. No platform fees, no inflated seat counts, no setup hidden in the small print. You pay for staff seats; everyone you serve joins free. Annual billing saves around two months on Foundation and Governance, onboarding is on us, and founding places take half off both – Enterprise founding terms are agreed in conversation.

The fair bit
You only ever pay for staff seats. Volunteers, families and the people you support join governed groups free, always.
No per-message fees from us. No per-participant creep. Seats count the staff in governed groups, not your whole payroll.
Tier 01 Foundation
Foundation
A single care home, centre or small charity
Founding rate · The Founding Ten
£199 £99 / month
Founding £990 / yr · List £1,990
Works out around 57p per staff member per week
  • Up to 40 staff seats
  • Unlimited volunteers, families & residents
  • Up to 15 groups – governed eights and any-size relays, from a committee of six to a whole home
  • Archive in your own Microsoft 365, audit trail included
  • Unlimited self-serve search & export · 2 guided SAR responses / year – our team on the call, your people at the keyboard
  • Onboarding & group migration included (annual plans)
  • Email support, 48-hour response
Start with Foundation
Tier 02 Our recommendation
Governance
Growing, multi-site organisations
Founding rate · The Founding Ten
£599 £299 / month
Founding £2,990 / yr · List £5,990
Works out around 28p per staff member per week
  • Up to 250 staff seats
  • Unlimited volunteers, families & residents
  • Unlimited groups – governed eights, any-size relays and Teams-mapped groups
  • Bulk export, ready to hand straight to a solicitor or a tribunal
  • Unlimited self-serve search & export · 15 guided SAR responses / year
  • Retention & hold policies set up with you
  • Teams Inbox – families on WhatsApp, your office answering from Teams, one-to-ones and groups alike
  • Quarterly compliance reports, drawn from your own evidence trail
  • Phone support, next-day response
Choose Governance
Tier 03 Enterprise
Enterprise
Large, multi-site care providers
Founding terms · By conversation
From £1,250 / month
From £15,000 / yr · custom
  • Unlimited staff seats & groups
  • Unlimited volunteers, families & residents
  • Unlimited guided SAR responses
  • Retention and legal holds set up across every site, with you
  • Multi-site numbers & per-site archives
  • Teams Inbox across every site – a channel per home, a thread per family contact and per mapped group
  • Bespoke connections to the systems you already run (care management, HR, Microsoft 365)
  • A named lead and guaranteed response times – with money back when we miss them
  • Onboarding & migration across every site included
Talk to us
The safety net Every tier carries both contract clauses from the founding offer: the Answerable Guarantee – the WhatsApp side of a SAR produced within a working day, or we work it with you free and refund your year if we still can't – and the no-hostage clause. The risk of trying this sits with us.
Setup & onboarding Included on every annual plan. We arrange your official WhatsApp Business number and move your existing groups across. No separate fee, ever.
If you need more Searching and exporting your own archive is never metered. If you'd like our team alongside for a SAR – on a call, scoping the searches your own people run – your allowance covers it; beyond that it's £150 each (Enterprise includes unlimited). Your data never passes through our hands. The Answerable Guarantee applies to every SAR either way. Optional extra training is £500 per half-day.
The honest anchor A single contested SAR or tribunal disclosure exercise routinely eats more staff time than a year of Governance costs. Price this against one bad month, not against zero.
PART 08 · READ BEFORE BUYING ANYTHING
Read this before buying anything in this category

What we won't promise. And nobody honest can.

We won't · 01

Read personal phones.

Nobody can, lawfully. A vendor who says otherwise is selling you a data breach with a dashboard. Governance starts where ownership starts: on a number the charity controls.

We won't · 02

Absorb your existing groups.

WhatsApp lets nobody – including us – join groups that already exist. We migrate you forward instead, with the rollout plan, invites and policy templates to make the switch stick.

We won't · 03

Monitor anyone covertly.

Every governed group is disclosed to its members, with the wording supplied by us. Disclosure is what makes the archive usable as evidence and your position defensible.

We won't · 04

Claim "zero knowledge".

Some vendors promise that nobody – not even you – could ever read the archive. An archive nobody can read cannot answer a Subject Access Request: governance and zero knowledge are mutually exclusive. Yours lives in your own Microsoft 365, readable by the people you authorise – and we say out loud what that does and doesn't mean.

We won't · 05

Keep a copy of your messages.

Not for backup, not for convenience, not "encrypted on our side". A vendor holding every client's archive has built one well-signposted vault – and an archive of exactly that shape was emptied by hackers in May 2025. Yours exists in your own Microsoft 365, behind your own locks, and nowhere else.

If another vendor promises any of the above, ask them to put it in the contract. Ours is in writing, in the founding offer above.
PART 09 · SECURITY
Security & data protection

The safest archive is the one we never hold.

Start with the part no certificate can grant: we cannot read your messages. Not won't – can't. They travel from WhatsApp straight into your own Microsoft 365, and the machinery that carries them runs inside your organisation's own Microsoft cloud, not on ours. What reaches us is bookkeeping – which plan, how many seats, whether everything is running. There is nothing of yours for us to breach. The rest is below, and where we're still earning a certificate, we say so.

01 · Custody

We can't read a word

No copy of any conversation ever exists with us – not for support, not for backup, not at all. Ask any vendor what a breach at their end would spill. Our honest answer: your name, your invoice and a green light.

02 · Standards

Designed to ISO 27001

Information security mapped to ISO 27001:2022 controls from day one; independent certification is on the roadmap, and until it's earned we'll keep saying so plainly. A certificate attests to how carefully a vendor guards what it holds – our first control was to hold no messages at all.

03 · Government

Cyber Essentials path

Targeting certification under the UK NCSC scheme. Increasingly expected by funders and public sector partners.

04 · Residency

UK data residency

Your archive lives in your own UK-based Microsoft 365; messages pass through Microsoft's UK data centres on their way in. Every third party we rely on – Microsoft, WhatsApp, Stripe for billing – is named in our published sub-processor list.

05 · Privacy

GDPR by design

The data protection paperwork – impact assessment, records of processing, lawful-basis analysis – arrives drafted for your circumstances, ready for your data protection lead to adapt and sign. We do the writing; you do the owning, because only you can.

06 · Transparency

Disclosed capture only

No covert monitoring. Members are in an organisation-owned group and told it is governed. Lawful and ethical by default.

Why we built it this way · May 2025

In May 2025, one of the best-known names in message archiving was breached. The service ran modified versions of WhatsApp and Signal, and kept a readable copy of every client's messages on its own servers – senior US government officials' and major financial firms' alike, all in one place. The intruder reportedly needed less than half an hour. Message content was stolen, the flaw entered the US government's catalogue of actively exploited vulnerabilities, and the service was suspended.

We take no pleasure in the story – the people involved were working on the same problem we are. We retell it because the lesson is not about one company's carelessness; it is about shape. A vendor that holds everyone's archive has assembled a single, well-signposted prize. That breach wasn't bad luck. It was geometry.

So we built the opposite shape. Your messages travel through WhatsApp's official business service – no modified apps, nothing bolted on – into your own Microsoft 365, and they exist only there. We keep no copy. Our own systems see what an invoice sees: seats, tier, service health – never a word of a conversation. An attacker who wanted a hundred organisations' archives would have to breach a hundred organisations, one set of defences at a time. There is no pot of messages at our end, so there is no pot to steal.

Names, dates and sources available on the call – we'd rather argue architecture than point fingers.
PART 10 · QUESTIONS
Frequently asked

Questions worth asking.

Yes. Governed conversations and groups run on WhatsApp's official business service, on a number and business account your organisation owns in its own name with Meta. Members know the channel is governed and are told so in wording we supply. That is fully within WhatsApp's terms and meets GDPR transparency requirements. We do not tap, scrape or covertly join anyone's existing personal groups, which is neither possible nor permitted.
In a governed conversation, your organisation's own WhatsApp number is a legitimate participant, so messages are delivered to it by WhatsApp itself rather than intercepted off anyone's device. From there each message is archived into your own Microsoft 365, under your retention, legal holds and access rules. We do not run a modified version of WhatsApp and we do not claim "zero knowledge", because governance and zero knowledge are mutually exclusive. Any vendor promising both is misrepresenting how this works.
Fourteen days is typical from signed order to first captured conversation: number live, your groups running, every message archived into your own Microsoft 365. One thing takes longer, and we say so: ordinary WhatsApp groups need Meta's Official Business badge on your account, which has its own waiting period – it typically clears around week five, and we run the application for you. Your side of the work is approving the wording and turning up to one 45-minute session.
You talk, mostly. Bring the scenario that worries you – the group nobody admits to, the leaver with two years of messages on their phone, the SAR you'd dread. We map your exposure against the rules that apply to you, show you the product only where it's relevant, and send you a one-page summary written for trustees. There is nothing to prepare and nothing to pass, and if we're not the fit we'll say so on the call.
There are three kinds, and we are straight about the differences. Ordinary governed groups on a business-owned number are capped by Meta at eight members plus your organisation's number, and they need Meta's Official Business badge – an application we run with you during onboarding. Teams-mapped groups carry the same cap, with one addition: the group is mirrored into a thread in your Microsoft Teams channel, so office staff take part from Teams while everyone else stays on WhatsApp. Relay groups have no size cap and work from day one: members message your organisation's number, and every message is passed on to everyone else, labelled with the sender's name. A committee of six fits an ordinary group; a handover group your managers watch from the office is Teams-mapped; a board of fifteen runs as a relay. Anyone promising fifty-person ordinary WhatsApp groups on a business number is describing something Meta does not offer.
Yes, and we provide the templates. Transparency is a GDPR requirement and an ethical one. We supply notification copy for staff, for relatives joining governed groups, and for your trustee board. In practice, almost everyone is reassured rather than alarmed.
No, and any tool that claims to is either misleading you or breaking WhatsApp's terms. WhatsApp only allows governance of groups created on your business number, so the model is to migrate activity into governed groups going forward and make that the way your organisation uses WhatsApp. We give you the rollout plan, the member invites, and the staff and trustee policy templates to make the switch stick.
That is a policy and culture problem, and we treat it as one. Governed groups become the only approved channel, backed by a safeguarding-grounded policy your trustees can stand behind. On charity-issued phones, your IT settings can enforce it. The lever is making the governed channel the easy, expected default, not pretending we can secretly read private phones.
You do. We set you up directly with Meta: your own business account, your own verified number, all held in your organisation's name – we automate around it. The set-up is done for you, included on every annual plan. Because the traffic is conversation rather than marketing, most messages are free at Meta's end – and the occasional chargeable one is included in your plan. There is no per-message billing, from us or passed through.
Yes. Anywhere WhatsApp has become operationally important, governance becomes operationally important. Fundraising teams, volunteer coordinators, safeguarding leads and trustee chats are all in scope. Pricing is by staff seat and participants are always free, so widening the use case never widens the bill.
You take everything with you – and the archive itself already lives in your own Microsoft 365, so the records were never ours to withhold. To be equally clear about what stops: capture, relays, the Teams Inbox and the admin portal end with the subscription. The number, the account and every message archived to that day remain yours – conversations simply carry on afterwards without being captured. The little we do hold – account records, configuration – is exported to you in open formats within fourteen days, its deletion confirmed in writing, and we help you rotate any credentials we ever handled. There are no exit fees. Founding terms are exactly as the offer states: half price for two years, then today's list price locked for life – never the price we charge new customers later. On Governance that's £2,990 a year for two years, £5,990 a year from year three, while the list price for everyone else moves on without you. We intend to earn the renewal, not enforce it.
Less than you'd fear, because we arranged it that way. Your archive is captured straight into your own Microsoft 365 and exists nowhere on our side – we cannot read your messages, so neither can anyone who breaks into us. What our systems do hold is the unglamorous layer: account records, configuration, billing. We guard that to the standards in the security section, and if it were ever compromised we would tell you within the timescales UK GDPR sets, in plain English. In May 2025, an archiving vendor that kept readable copies of clients' WhatsApp and Signal messages on its own servers lost them to a hacker in under half an hour. We keep no such copy, so we have no such morning ahead of us. When you compare vendors, put this exact question to each of them – and ask where the copy lives.
The Founding Ten · places open

Find out where you stand before someone asks.

Thirty minutes with our team. Bring your messiest scenario – the group nobody admits to, the leaver with two years of messages – and leave with a one-page, board-ready summary of your WhatsApp exposure, plus a straight answer on whether we're the fit. Even if that answer is no.

Book the risk audit Just send the trustee briefing

The briefing: one page on WhatsApp exposure, written for boards. No follow-up unless you ask for one.