Terms of Service

01Agreement and scope of work

Every engagement starts with a written plan: the scope, deliverables, milestones, timeline and a fixed quote. Work begins once you accept the plan and open the contract.

Anything that is not in the written plan is out of scope. Extra work is handled through a change request (see “Changes to scope”).

02Pricing and payments

• Fixed-price work is split into milestones. You fund each milestone through Upwork or Fiverr escrow, and it is released when you accept the delivery.
• Hourly work is billed through the marketplace against weekly time reports.
• Scale and custom engagements may instead be invoiced monthly against agreed milestones, payable within the period stated on the invoice.
• Prices exclude taxes, VAT and marketplace fees unless your quote says otherwise.
• Prices on our website are starting points and are open to negotiation. Tell us your budget and we will agree a price and scope together.
• Once you accept the written quote, the price is fixed for that scope.

03Changes to scope

If the scope changes, we raise a written change request that states the cost and timeline impact. No extra work starts until you approve it, and the fixed price of the original scope does not change.

04Delivery and acceptance

We deliver working software to a staging environment throughout the project and demo it weekly. A milestone is accepted when you approve it, or when five business days pass after delivery without written feedback that identifies a defect against the agreed scope.

Revisions are included as stated in your plan, for example two rounds of changes per stage. Requests beyond that are treated as changes to scope.

05Post-launch support and warranty

Every project includes a support window that starts on the production launch date, or on final milestone acceptance if you launch yourself. The length depends on the tier and is included in the price:

During the window we will, at no extra charge:

• Fix defects in what we built that do not behave as described in the written scope.
• Restore service if a defect we introduced causes an outage.
• Monitor the production system and make small adjustments.

The support window does not cover:

• New features or any change to the agreed scope.
• Defects caused by changes that someone other than us made to the code or infrastructure.
• Problems caused by third-party changes, such as a cloud outage, a deprecated API or a new app store policy.
• Content entry, or training beyond the documented handover.

06Maintenance and support plans

When the included window ends you can move to a monthly care plan (Essential Care, Business Care or Premium Care), or agree a custom SLA under a custom engagement. Plans are optional; you can instead take maintenance in-house using the documentation we hand over.

Each plan includes a set number of engineering hours and a first-response target by severity:

Severity is set as follows:

• Critical: production is down, or a core flow such as sign-in, checkout or payments is unusable and there is no workaround.
• High: a major feature is impaired but a workaround exists.
• Normal: minor defects, questions and small change requests.

How plans work in practice:

• Response times are targets for our first response, not for a resolution. We keep you updated until the issue is resolved.
• Business hours are Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays, in the time zone agreed in your plan. Out-of-hours cover applies only to Critical issues on Premium Care.
• Included hours cover fixes, dependency upgrades, small improvements and technical advice. Unused hours do not roll over unless we agree otherwise in writing. Additional hours are available at the rate in your plan.
• We apply security patches for known vulnerabilities in your dependencies promptly after release, testing them on staging before production.
• Plans cover systems we built, or systems we have accepted in writing. Systems built by others may need a paid onboarding review first.
• Plans are billed monthly in advance and renew automatically. You can cancel at any time with 30 days’ written notice, and we do not refund the current month.
• Hosting fees, third-party services and licences are not part of a plan; they are billed to you by their providers.

07Hosting, infrastructure and third-party services

Your cloud accounts, domains, app store accounts, AI model keys and third-party subscriptions are yours, and their costs are billed to you directly by each provider. We estimate them in your plan and work inside your accounts with the minimum access needed, which you can revoke at any time.

We are not responsible for outages, price changes or policy changes at third-party providers, although we will help you respond to them under your support window or plan.

08Intellectual property and ownership

• You own the deliverables (code, designs, models, infrastructure definitions and documentation) once the relevant milestone is paid in full.
• We keep ownership of our pre-existing tools, libraries and general know-how, and grant you a perpetual, royalty-free licence to use them as part of the deliverables.
• Open-source components remain under their own licences, which we record in the handover documentation.
• We will not name you or show your work publicly, including in our portfolio, without your written permission.

09Confidentiality and data

We keep your non-public information confidential and use it only to deliver the work. We will sign your NDA before the scope call if you ask. When we handle personal data on your behalf, we act on your instructions and will sign a data-processing agreement on request.

We do not send your confidential code or data to third-party AI tools unless you have agreed to that in writing.

10Your responsibilities

• Give feedback and approvals within three business days, so the timeline holds.
• Provide the access, content and materials the plan lists, and make sure you have the right to use them.
• Tell us promptly about production incidents so we can respond within your support window or plan.

Delays on your side move the delivery dates by the same amount.

11Cancellation, termination and refunds

• Either of us can end an engagement with written notice.
• You pay for work completed and accepted up to the end date, and pro rata for work in progress. Funded escrow for work we have not started is returned to you.
• If we cannot fix a defect covered by the post-launch warranty, we will refund the part of the milestone that relates to it.
• Refunds and disputes on Upwork and Fiverr also follow those platforms’ rules.

12Warranties and liability

We perform the work with reasonable skill and care. We cannot guarantee specific business results, such as revenue, conversion rates or search rankings.

To the extent the law allows, our total liability for a project is limited to the fees you paid for it in the twelve months before the claim, and we are not liable for indirect or consequential losses. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

13Disputes and governing law

If something goes wrong, tell us first. We would rather fix it than argue about it. If we cannot agree, the marketplace’s dispute process applies to contracts opened there. Otherwise, these terms are governed by the law of the jurisdiction named in your contract.

14Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The version in force when your contract begins applies to that engagement. Questions? Email hello@githawk.dev.