The Service Agreement

What you own — from day one

Most website disputes are really ownership disputes discovered late. This engagement is structured so the question never arises:

• Your domain — registered in your business’s name, on your business’s card. I am invited in as a user, never the owner.
• Your hosting and email accounts — same rule: your name, your card, from day one.
• Your content — every word of copy, every image, every brand asset produced for you.
• Your customer data — your CRM runs in your own account, which you pay for directly. Your list is yours.

What you don’t own — and why I say it up front

The code. Your site runs on the same platform every client’s site runs on — that shared platform is why it is fast, why it is maintained, and why keeping it running costs what it costs instead of an agency retainer. There is no code buy-out, because there is no separable code to buy: selling it to you would mean selling you the platform under everyone else.

I put this in writing before you sign anything, because "you don’t own the code," discovered at exit, is exactly the kind of surprise this whole engagement is designed against. What protects you is not owning the code — it is owning everything above: your domain, your email, your content, your data. With those, you can leave; without them, code ownership would not save you.

If payment stops

The site goes dark. That is all. Non-payment never touches your domain, your email, or your data — they are in your name and were never mine to withhold. Restarting the subscription brings the site back.

If you leave

Everything exportable is exported and handed over within 14 days: content, images, CRM data, the measurement records. Your domain and email were never mine to hand over — they are already yours. No exit fee, no notice period beyond the current month.

The lift commitment

Where a Measurement Agreement is in place (12+ months of your own history, a baseline we can establish), the subscription carries a performance term: the agreed lift on the one agreed metric, year over year. At three months you get a full measurement report — no fee consequence. At six months the test binds: if the lift is not shown, the monthly fee stops until it is — and all the work continues while it is paused, because that is the only way the lift arrives. At twelve months, if it still has not, we sit down and decide together: continue, change the metric, or part ways.

A business without the history to measure gets the same build and the same subscription with no lift term — stated plainly, because promising a measurement I cannot make would be the exact overclaim this practice exists to replace.

The paperwork, in full

This page and the Measurement Agreement are the entire contract. Nothing else to sign, no terms discovered later.