Terms of service

Who these terms are between

These terms apply to every website, app, hosting plan and other service GSTECH ("we", "us") provides to you, the client. Paying an invoice from us, or using a service we provide, means you accept them. Payments, refunds and cancellations are set out in more detail in our refund policy, and how we handle personal information in our privacy notice. Both form part of these terms.

Quotes and estimates

A price from our online estimator, a conversation or an email is an estimate. It is not binding on either of us. Work is agreed when we issue a written quote or invoice that sets out the scope and price, and you accept it by paying it. Anything outside that written scope is new work, quoted separately before we start it.

Dates we give are targets. Business days are Monday to Friday, Eastern Time, excluding US federal holidays. A schedule depends on you supplying what we ask for; when it arrives late, the date moves with it.

Payment

• Invoices are due 7 days after the date they are issued.
• Work over $2,000 needs a 50% deposit before it is scheduled, and the balance before the site launches.
• Work at or under $2,000, the $599 simple website included, is paid in full before the site launches.
• Hosting is billed monthly, in advance, and charged automatically to the card you save with us.
• We do not charge late fees.
• Build prices do not include tax; hosting prices do. See tax in the refund policy.

Payments are processed by Square. If an automatic hosting charge fails we try it three times in all over 7 days and email you each time. An unpaid invoice is followed up once it is 14 days past due. Once it is 30 days past due we may suspend the services it covers. A site that stays suspended for 30 days may be removed after we give you written notice. Suspension is a decision a person makes, never an automatic one, and paying the balance restores the service.

What you are responsible for

• Your content. Words, photos, logos, prices and anything else you give us to use are yours, and you confirm you have the right to use them and to let us use them for your project.
• Accuracy. You review and approve the facts on your site: services, prices, hours, licences and claims. We build from what you supply and approve.
• Access you give us. If you give us access to a domain, an email account or another service, you confirm you are allowed to. We use it only for your project. You can change those passwords when the work is done.
• Your accounts. Keep your domain registration, email and other accounts in good standing and paid. We are not responsible for a lapse in an account we do not control.
• Lawful use. Your site must follow the law and the acceptable use rules in these terms.

Ownership

You own your content from the start. You own the site we build for you once it is paid for in full. A leased site is yours at the end of its 24-month term, or earlier if you pay off the remaining balance.

We keep ownership of the tools, templates, layouts, code components and know-how we had before your project or build for general use, and we may reuse them for other clients. Where they are part of your site, we give you a permanent, non-exclusive licence to use them as part of that site, including if you move it to another host. You may not resell them separately.

Until the site is paid for, we may keep it offline or unpublished. We may list your project and show screenshots of the public site in our own portfolio; tell us if you would rather we did not.

Revisions

The simple website includes one combined round of corrections, sent within 7 days of the preview. Custom work includes the revisions written in its quote. Further changes, and changes after launch, are quoted before we make them.

Hosting

We run your site on servers we manage and keep the server and its security software maintained. We do not guarantee any level of uptime, and hosting comes with no service level agreement. We keep backups on a best effort basis; they are not a guarantee that every file can be recovered. Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose.

Acceptable use

A site we host may not be used for:

• anything illegal, or content that infringes someone else's rights;
• malware, phishing, spam or attacks on other systems;
• content that is fraudulent, deceptive, hateful or harassing, or that exploits minors;
• anything that puts unreasonable load on our servers or risks other clients' sites.

We may suspend a site without notice to stop abuse, illegal content, a security problem or a legal demand, and we will tell you why as soon as we can. We may also suspend for non-payment on the late-payment timeline in these terms.

Other companies' services

Your project depends on services run by other companies: domain registrars, Square for payments, Microsoft for email, and hosting, network and infrastructure providers. Their own terms apply to your use of them. We are not responsible for their outages, changes, prices or decisions, though we will help you work through a problem with them.

Cancellation and ending the work

You can cancel hosting at any time. It ends at the end of the paid period, with no charge for the next month and no refund for part of one. You can stop a project at any time; what is refunded is set out in the refund policy.

We may end a project or a hosting plan if you break these terms, do not pay, or ask us to do something unlawful. We may also end a hosting plan for any reason with 30 days' written notice. If we end a project for any reason other than your breach, we refund what you paid for work we have not done.

When hosting ends, you can ask for a copy of your content and, if the site is paid for, its files, so you can host it elsewhere. How long we keep them afterwards is in the privacy notice.

No warranty

We do our work with care and skill. Apart from that, our services and everything we deliver are provided "as is" and "as available". To the extent the law allows, we make no other promises, express or implied, including that a site will be uninterrupted, error-free, secure against every attack, fit for a particular purpose, or bring any particular amount of business or search ranking.

Limit of liability

To the extent the law allows, our total liability for any claim connected with our services is limited to the amount you paid us in the three months before the claim arose. We are not liable for indirect, incidental, special or consequential losses, including lost profits, revenue, data, customers or business opportunity, even if we were told they were possible. Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot be limited by law.

Indemnity

You agree to cover our reasonable costs, including legal fees, if someone makes a claim against us because of content or materials you supplied, or because your site was used in a way that breaks these terms or the law.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The new version is posted here with a new effective date. Changes apply from that date to new work, and to ongoing services from the next billing period. Payment consents you have already given stay tied to the version you agreed to until you agree to a new one.

The whole agreement

These terms, our refund policy, our privacy notice and any written quote or invoice you accepted are the whole agreement between us. Where a written quote says something different, the quote applies to that project. If any part of these terms cannot be enforced, the rest still applies. Not enforcing a term straight away does not mean we have given it up.

These terms are governed by the laws of the state where GSTECH is based. Any dispute is first discussed directly with us, in good faith, before either of us takes it further.

Contact

Questions about these terms go to [email protected].