How we contract, in plain words.

You own what we build

The intellectual property in the work we deliver is assigned to you in the contract, from the first commit, not on final payment. The work happens in your repositories, under your accounts, on your infrastructure. There is no licence-back, no component we keep control of, and nothing that stops working if you stop paying us.

The exception is our own tooling: the test harnesses, comparison rigs, scaffolding and internal libraries we bring with us stay ours. Where any of it is part of what we deliver, you get a perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free licence to use, change and sublicense it as part of your system. You are never blocked, and you never pay again for it.

Engagements and how they are priced

There are five kinds of engagement, set out on the How we work page. Two rules apply to all of them:

• An assessment before a fixed price on anything undocumented. A fixed price quoted before reading the system is either padded to cover what we cannot see, or wrong. The assessment is fixed-price and time-boxed, and its output is yours whether or not you continue with us.
• Change is priced, not absorbed in silence. If the scope moves, we say so, price it, and wait for your agreement. You will not find out at the end that the number moved.

We invoice monthly in arrears, payable within fourteen days unless the contract says otherwise. Work in progress may pause on a payment that is badly overdue. We will tell you before that happens, not after.

Your side of it

The work depends on things only you can provide: access to the systems in scope, a named person who can make decisions, and answers within a reasonable time. Where a delay in any of those moves the timeline, the timeline moves. We will say so at the time, rather than miss a date without explanation.

People

We name the engineers before an engagement starts. If we bring in a specialist, we tell you who and why, and they sign the same confidentiality and IP terms we do. Nobody is swapped mid-project without your agreement.

Confidentiality runs both ways and survives the engagement. We will not name you as a client, describe your systems, or publish a case study without your written permission. That is why some projects on this site are described by sector and not by name.

Security and access

We work under least privilege: access requested per environment, limited to what the work needs, and revoked when it ends. Secrets stay in your systems and are never copied into ours. Production access is granted only where the work needs it, and it is logged.

We run security audits as a service, so we expect to be held to the standard we hold others to.

Warranty, liability and ending an engagement

We warrant that we do the work with reasonable skill and care, and that delivered code meets the agreed specification. We fix defects in delivered work at our cost if you report them within thirty days. We do not warrant that software is free of all defects, and we cannot warrant third-party systems or code we did not write.

Liability is capped at the fees paid under the engagement, and neither side is liable for indirect or consequential loss. Retainers and team extension run monthly, and either side may end them with thirty days’ written notice. Either side may end a project for a material breach that is not fixed within thirty days of written notice.

However an engagement ends, you keep the code, the documentation, the runbooks and the decision records. You should be able to carry on without a transition project. If you cannot, we have not done our job.

What we do not do

We do not take design-only work. We do not take projects we cannot staff properly. We do not quote a fixed price on an undocumented system before an assessment. We do not claim work in sectors we have not delivered in.