What you get, in plain English.

Who you're dealing with

Subnetix is a sole-trader business based in Truro, Cornwall, UK, run by Aiden. Contact us by [email protected] or 07598 877 831. In these terms, "we" and "us" means Subnetix, and "you" means the person or business buying the work. These terms apply alongside your written proposal; where the two differ, the proposal wins.

Quotes and fixed prices

Before any work starts you get a written proposal setting out the scope, the price and the timeline. That price is fixed — it does not move because the work took us longer than we expected, and it does not move because we underestimated it. Guide prices on our pricing page are exactly that: a guide. The number in your proposal is the number you pay. A proposal is valid for 30 days, and the contract starts when you accept it in writing (email is fine) and pay the deposit.

The 10% deposit, and how payment works

Every website build starts with a 10% deposit. It confirms your start date, takes that slot out of our calendar, and covers the scoping and planning that happens before you see anything. It is part of the agreed price, never an addition to it.

From there, payment on fixed-price work is 50% up front and the balance on launch — and the 10% deposit counts towards that first 50%, so the amount due when work begins is the remaining 40%. If you'd rather spread it, any build over £500 can be paid in three monthly instalments at no extra charge; the deposit still comes off the total.

The deposit is non-refundable once we have begun work, because by then the slot is committed and the time is spent. If you cancel before we start, you get it back in full. See “Cancelling a build” below, and note the separate consumer cancellation rights further down if you are not buying as a business.

A free hour of changes before launch

Every new website build includes one hour of changes, free, after you have reviewed the finished site and before it goes live. This is for the things you only notice when you see it properly — wording, a photo you'd rather swap, spacing, a heading that isn't quite right. You don't need to save them up or justify them; send the list and we'll work through it.

What that hour is not for is a change of direction — a different design, a restructure, or pages that weren't in the scope. That's new work, and we'll quote it before doing it rather than quietly billing you. Changes beyond the free hour are charged at our published hourly rate, and we'll always tell you when you're about to cross the line.

Timelines, and what we need from you

We give you a launch date at the quote stage and we work to it. The one thing that reliably moves it is content: text, images, logos, and access to your domain or existing hosting. If we're waiting on you, the date moves by roughly the length of the wait, and we'll say so at the time rather than at the end. If a project stalls on your side for more than 60 days we may invoice for the work completed to that point and re-book the remainder when you're ready.

Payment

The schedule for build work is set out above. Invoices are payable within 14 days by bank transfer or card. Prices are in pounds sterling. Subnetix is not currently VAT registered, so no VAT is charged. If an invoice is more than 30 days overdue we may pause work and, for hosted sites, suspend the service after giving you at least 7 days' written notice — we will not take a site down without warning you first. We reserve the statutory right to interest and recovery costs on late commercial payments, though we would much rather ring you.

Refunds

Before work starts, you get everything you've paid back. Once work has started, the deposit is non-refundable and anything else you've paid is refundable only for work not yet carried out. Once all the work in the proposal has been completed and delivered, payments are non-refundable — the work exists, you have it, and it cannot be un-built.

That is not a licence for us to deliver something poor and keep your money. If the work doesn't do what the proposal said it would, we fix it at our cost. See the next section.

If something's broken, we fix it

For 90 days after launch, anything that doesn't work as described in your proposal gets fixed free of charge — broken forms, layout faults, things that fail on a particular browser or phone. That is a defect guarantee, not a change allowance: it covers work that isn't doing what it was meant to, not work you've since decided you want done differently. It doesn't cover faults caused by someone else editing the site, by third-party services changing, or by content you've added yourself. Sites on a care plan are covered for as long as the plan runs.

Who owns what

Once you've paid in full, the design and the code we wrote for your site are yours, outright, to keep, move or have someone else work on. Your domain is registered in your name, not ours. Your content stays yours throughout and you keep responsibility for having the right to use it — if you supply photos, text or a logo, you confirm you're allowed to.

Two ordinary exceptions. Third-party components — fonts, libraries, plugins, hosted services — stay under their own licences, and we'll tell you which ones your site depends on. And we keep the right to reuse our own generic tooling and techniques on other projects; we are not handing over exclusive rights to the way we build things generally, only to what we built for you. We'd also like to show the finished work in our portfolio, but if you'd rather we didn't, say so and we won't.

Hosting and care plans

Care plans are rolling and monthly. There is no minimum term and no contract to sign. You can cancel at any time with 30 days' notice, and we'll bill the final month and stop — no cancellation fee, no penalty, no "administrative charge". Plans are paid monthly in advance. Included change hours are use-it-or-lose-it within the month, because the point of them is a steady trickle of small improvements rather than a bank balance.

We aim for 99.9% uptime and we monitor it, but we can't promise the internet will never break. Scheduled maintenance is done outside business hours wherever possible. If a third-party provider we depend on has an outage, we'll keep you informed and get you back up as fast as we can.

Leaving is free

If you decide to move to another provider — for any reason, or none — it costs you nothing. No exit fee, no release fee, no charge to hand over your files, and no charge for our time doing it. We will export your site, transfer your domain, pass over your DNS records and talk your new provider through anything they need. We'll do it promptly and without sulking.

We think holding a client's website hostage is a confession that you couldn't keep them any other way. The only thing we ask is that any invoices for work already done are settled first, and we'll keep a backup of your site for 30 days after you go in case you need anything else from it.

Cancelling a build

You can cancel a build at any time by telling us in writing. If we haven't started, you owe nothing and the deposit is returned. If we have started, you pay for the work completed up to that point, the deposit is not refunded, and you keep everything we've produced so far. If we cancel — which we'd only do if the work turned out to be something we can't do properly, or if the relationship stops working — you pay only for what's been delivered and we refund the rest, deposit included.

If you're buying as a consumer

Most of our clients are businesses. If you're buying as a consumer rather than for a business, you have additional legal rights that these terms do not affect. In particular, for a contract agreed at a distance or away from our premises you have a 14-day right to cancel under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013. If you ask us to start within those 14 days and then cancel, we may charge for the work done up to that point. Nothing in these terms limits your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 to work carried out with reasonable care and skill.

Liability

We do this carefully, but no one can promise a website will never have a problem. Our total liability for any claim connected with a project is limited to the amount you paid us for that project; for ongoing services it is limited to the fees paid in the previous 12 months. We are not liable for indirect or consequential losses — lost profit, lost business, lost data where you had the means to keep your own copy. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited, including a consumer's statutory rights.

Confidentiality and your data

Anything commercially sensitive you share with us stays between us, during the project and after it. How we handle personal information is set out separately in our privacy notice. Where we process personal data on your behalf — for example, enquiries submitted through a site we host for you — we do so on your instructions and with appropriate security measures.

Complaints, and the legal bit

If you're unhappy, email or ring Aiden directly — there is no ticket queue and no account manager to get past, and most things are sorted the same day. If we genuinely can't agree, we'll both try to resolve it in good faith before anyone involves lawyers. These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction. We may update these terms from time to time; the version that applies to your project is the one published when you accepted your proposal, and material changes to an ongoing service will be given 30 days' notice.