Terms of service

Who you are contracting with

Services are provided by Toby Kalkman, trading as Kalkman Digital, a sole trader based in Suffolk, United Kingdom. Contact: hello@kalkmandigital.co.uk, 07364 245748. Postal address: 10 Irex Road, Lowestoft, Suffolk, NR33 7BU.

Quotes and what they cover

Work is quoted in writing before it starts. A quote sets out what is included and what is not, and it holds for 30 days. If you ask for something that was not in the quote, I will tell you what it costs before doing it rather than adding it to the final bill.

Nothing on this website is itself a contractual offer. The hourly rate shown is the actual rate and not a range; the website figures, one-off and monthly, are starting points that rise with the size of the job. Where the site says that taking several services costs less than buying them separately, that is a statement of how I price, not a published discount you can calculate — the figure is the one in your written quote.

Payment

For a one-off website, I build the site and show it to you on a development link before invoicing. You see the finished thing first. The invoice follows your approval and is payable within 14 days; the site goes live and the hosting account is transferred to you once it is settled.

Monthly cover, including Full Service, is billed in advance with no setup fee, on a minimum term of six months. After those six months you may leave with 30 days’ notice and take the website, any application and the accounts with you. The minimum term exists because anything built to get you started is delivered up front and recovered over that period.

Ongoing IT support cover is billed in advance for the period it covers. What it includes, and what a call-out outside it costs, is set out in the written quote for your business.

A ground-up tech review is priced and delivered on its own. If you go on to have me do work arising from it, what you paid for the review is credited against that work; if you do not, the write-up is yours and nothing further is owed.

Work outside an agreed package, and support once a one-off project has been handed over, is charged at an hourly rate agreed in writing, whether bought as it comes up or as a block of hours drawn down. It is quoted before it starts.

Late payment is subject to statutory interest under the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998. I would much rather send you a reminder than invoke that.

Handover and accounts

Where a site is hosted on Cloudflare, the account holding it is transferred into your name at handover, so the hosting, the domain settings and the site itself are all yours. If you want me to keep working on it afterwards, you grant me access; you can revoke that at any time without asking me.

What you need to give me

Projects need your input: text, photographs, logos, access to any existing site or domain, and timely answers. If those do not arrive, the timescale moves. If a project goes quiet for more than 60 days I may invoice for the work completed to that point and close it.

You confirm that anything you give me — images, text, logos — is yours to use, or that you have permission to use it.

IT support: access and your data

Looking after your technology means I need access to the equipment, and to the accounts that run on it. You confirm that the devices and accounts you ask me to work on belong to your business, or that you have permission from whoever owns them. Accounts stay in your business’s name and I work from my own login, so you can remove my access at any time without asking me.

Repair work can put data at risk, particularly where a disk or a system is already failing. If there is no working backup of something you cannot afford to lose, tell me, and taking one becomes the first part of the job. I take reasonable care with your files, but I cannot guarantee the recovery of data that is already lost or on failing hardware, and I will say so rather than charge to attempt something I do not expect to work.

Who owns the result

Once the final invoice is paid, you own the website or application built for you, including its source code, and you are free to host it, modify it or move it elsewhere. Nothing is licensed back to you and there is no fee to keep it working.

Third-party components used within it — open-source libraries, stock photography, fonts — remain under their own licences. I will tell you what those are.

I keep the right to describe the work publicly and show it in my portfolio, unless you ask me not to, which is fine and costs nothing.

What I do not promise

Search engine rankings are decided by Google, not by me. I will do competent, current work to improve how your site is understood and found, and I will show you what changes. I cannot promise a position, a volume of enquiries, or a timescale for either, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does.

Hosting and third-party services occasionally fail. Where I host your site I will work to get it back quickly, but I do not offer a guaranteed uptime figure.

IT support work is done remotely wherever that is possible, with visits by arrangement. I do not offer a guaranteed response or restoration time, and where a fix depends on a third party — a manufacturer, a broadband provider, a cloud service — their timescales are not mine to give.

Putting things right

If something I built is broken or not as agreed, tell me within 30 days of handover and I will fix it at no charge. After that, fixes are covered by the monthly package if you are on it, and otherwise charged at the hourly rate or quoted as new work. That is what a small studio is for.

My total liability in connection with any project or piece of work is limited to the amount you have paid me for it. I am not liable for indirect or consequential losses such as lost profits, lost business, or lost data where a backup was available and was not taken. Nothing here limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Cancelling

You can cancel a project at any time. You pay for work done up to that point and I hand over whatever exists.

Ongoing IT support cover can be ended by either of us with 30 days’ notice. Anything I hold on your behalf — access, notes on how your setup is put together — is handed back when it ends.

If you are a consumer rather than a business, and we agreed the work without meeting face to face, the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013 give you 14 days from the day we agreed it to change your mind and cancel, without giving a reason. Email or message me and that is enough — you do not need a form or a particular form of words.

Most people want the work started sooner than that. If you ask me to begin inside those 14 days, you are asking me to start during the cancellation period, and two things follow: you can still cancel, but you pay for the work I have actually done by the time you tell me; and once the job is finished and delivered you no longer have the right to cancel it. I will say this again in writing when you accept a quote, so nobody is agreeing to it by having read a page once.

If you would rather I did not start until the 14 days are up, say so and I will wait. Nothing in these terms takes away a statutory right you have as a consumer.

Wedding and memorial pages

A wedding or memorial page is quoted and owned like any other job. It comes with five years of hosting from the day it goes live, included in the price. Your guests’ photographs and words are yours: you can download every original and every message from the page at any time, and three months before the term ends I will write to ask whether you want to renew, take the export, or take the whole thing.

While I host it I act as your data processor under a short schedule in the contract, which sets out what is held, where, for how long, and how a guest gets a photograph taken down. These pages are usually wanted for a fixed date, so the work often starts inside the 14-day cancellation period above, on the terms set out there.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales have jurisdiction.