The short version
The quote we give you is the price you pay. Your deposit is refundable until you approve the design. When the final invoice is paid, the website is yours — design, code and content.
The rest of this page is the careful version of those three sentences, plus what happens when something goes wrong.
Nothing here is meant to be a trap. If a clause reads as unfair, say so before you sign and we’ll talk about it — that’s a much better outcome for both of us than discovering it later.
Who these terms cover
These terms apply to two things: using this website, and hiring Clearly Built to build or look after a website for you.
Your individual written proposalis the document that describes your specific project — scope, price and timeline. Where the proposal and this page disagree, the proposal wins. This page fills in everything the proposal doesn’t say.
Using this website
You’re welcome to read, print and share anything on this site. The words, design, code and images on it belong to us, so please don’t republish them as your own or copy the site wholesale for a competing studio.
Don’t attempt to break, overload or gain unauthorised access to the site, and don’t use the contact form to send unsolicited commercial messages. We may block access to anyone doing either.
The examples, prices and timelines on this site are illustrations of how we work, not a binding offer. The binding number is the one in your written proposal.
Quotes and proposals
Every project starts with a free discovery call, followed by a written, fixed-price proposal, normally within 48 hours. No deposit is taken before you have seen it.
The fixed price is genuinely fixed.Once we have agreed the scope, the number in the proposal is the number you pay. If you later ask for something outside that scope, we’ll quote the addition separately and in writing, and we won’t start it until you’ve said yes. The original price does not quietly inflate.
A proposal is open for 30 days unless it says otherwise, because our availability and third-party costs change.
Payment, deposits and refunds
Projects are billed in two halves. 50% to start, which begins the design work, and 50% at launch, due before the site goes live. Larger projects can be split into three — the schedule will be in your proposal. We don’t bill by the hour and we don’t send invoices you haven’t seen coming.
Your deposit is fully refundableat any point before you approve the design in writing. If you don’t love what we designed, say so and we’ll refund it. We would rather return a deposit than build something you aren’t proud of.
Once you have approved the design in writing, the deposit is non-refundable, because that approval is the point at which the build work begins.
Invoices are due within 14 days. If an invoice goes materially overdue, we may pause work and, after reasonable written notice, suspend a hosted site — but we will always contact you first, and we will never hold your domain or content hostage over a billing dispute.
What we need from you
A project runs on your input. We need your content, images, logo and feedback at the points we flag, and reasonably prompt answers to questions that block progress.
You confirm you have the right to use what you send us. Text, photographs, logos, fonts and anything else. If you don’t hold the rights to a photo, tell us and we’ll help you find one you can legally use. You agree to cover us for claims arising from material you supplied that turns out not to be yours to use.
If a project stalls on our side, that’s our problem to fix. If it stalls for more than 60 days waiting on something from you, we may treat it as paused, invoice for work completed to that point, and re-quote the remainder against our availability at the time.
Revisions and approval
During design there is no revision counter. We refine the design with you until you would genuinely sign off on it; that written approval is the gate, not a number of rounds.
During the buildyou get two full rounds of revisions on the private staging site. Changes that go beyond refining the approved design — new pages, new functionality, a different direction — are new scope, and we’ll quote them before doing them.
Launch, and the first week after
We handle the technical side of launch: hosting, domain configuration, SSL and search-engine basics. Going live requires your final approval and the final payment.
For 7 days after launchwe fix small issues free of charge — typos, broken links, layout problems, anything that isn’t working as it should. That window is for fixing what we built, not for adding new things.
Care plans, hosting and cancellation
Care plans are monthly and cover hosting, domain, backups, security updates and monitoring, plus the support described in your plan. They’re billed monthly in advance and quoted with your proposal.
You can cancel a care plan at any timewith 30 days’ written notice. There is no minimum term and no cancellation fee. If you cancel, we will help you move the site, domain and accounts somewhere else — a full handoff including source code, accounts and a training session is available for a one-time fee quoted at the time.
We can also cancel a plan with 30 days’ notice. If we ever do, we’ll hand everything over properly rather than leaving you stranded.
Who owns what
When your final invoice is paid, the website is yours. The design, the page content, the custom code written for your project, and your domain — all of it, in your name.
Two sensible exceptions. We keep ownership of the general tools, components and techniques we reuse across projects, and you get a permanent licence to use them as part of your site. And third-party components — open-source libraries, stock photography, fonts — stay under their own licences, which we’ll tell you about where they matter.
Until the final invoice is paid, the work remains ours. We don’t use that as leverage, but it is the position.
Showing the work.We’d like to show your finished site in our portfolio and case studies. If you’d rather we didn’t, tell us and we won’t — before or after launch, no explanation needed.
Third-party services
Most websites depend on services we don’t control — hosting, domain registrars, payment processors, booking tools, email delivery. We’ll recommend sensible ones and set them up properly, but their pricing, availability and terms are theirs, not ours, and we can’t be responsible for an outage or policy change at a company we don’t run.
What we promise, and what we don't
We promise the work will be carried out with reasonable skill and care, that the site will function as described in your proposal, and that we’ll fix defects in what we built during the 7-day window and under any active care plan.
We can’t promise specific business outcomes. Nobody honest can guarantee a search ranking, a volume of enquiries or an amount of revenue, and any studio that does is selling you something. We build the site properly and give it the best technical foundation we can.
Beyond what’s written here, and to the extent the law allows, the site and services are provided without further warranties. Nothing on this page limits rights you have under Canadian consumer protection law that can’t be limited by agreement.
Limits on liability
If something goes wrong and it’s our fault, our total liability is limited to the fees you paid us in the 12 months before the problem arose. We aren’t liable for indirect losses — lost profits, lost data, lost business opportunity — even where we knew they were possible.
These limits do not apply to fraud, to death or personal injury caused by negligence, or to anything else the law doesn’t let us limit.
Ending a project
You can end a project at any time in writing. Before design approval, your deposit comes back. After it, you pay for work completed to that point and we hand over what exists.
We can end a project in writing if an invoice goes materially overdue, if we can’t get the input we need to continue, or if someone is abusive to a member of our team. In the first two cases we’ll invoice for work completed; in the last, we’ll refund anything unearned.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the laws of the Province of Ontario and the federal laws of Canada that apply there, and the courts of Ontario have jurisdiction.
If you have a problem, please raise it with us directly first. In several years of doing this, every disagreement has been settled by a phone call, and we’d like to keep that record.
Changes to these terms
We may update this page as the business changes. The date at the top tells you when it last moved. Changes aren’t retroactive — the version in force when you accepted your proposal is the one that governs your project, and we’ll send you a copy on request.
Something here you’d want changed?
Say so before you sign. We’d far rather discuss a clause up front than have you find it in the middle of a project.