How we agree to work

“We” and “us” mean the studio. “You” means the person or business paying for the work. If you are signing on behalf of a company, we take it that you are allowed to.

The studio is small on purpose. There is no account manager between you and the person writing the code, which is the point of hiring us and also the honest limit of our capacity at any one time.

Ferrin must decide the studio's exact legal identity for a contract — registered business name, registration number, and whether agreements are signed by the business or by him personally. A terms page with no legal entity on it cannot be enforced by either side.

The sequence is always the same. You tell us what you need. We ask questions until we understand it. We send back a written scope — what is included, what is not, roughly how long — and a price. Nothing is built on a verbal “go ahead” and a hope.

A quote is not a contract. It is an offer with a life span, and it stops being valid if the work changes shape or if too much time passes.

Ferrin must decide how long a quote stays open — 14 days, 30 days — and whether an agreed scope is a separate signed document or simply an accepted email. Then say which one here.

Dates. We give you a realistic finish date, not a flattering one. Dates are honest estimates, not guarantees, and the things that move them are named in section 04 and section 05.

No surprise invoices. If something falls outside what we agreed, we tell you what it costs before doing it, not after.

Ferrin must decide the payment structure and write it here as numbers: the deposit percentage, what triggers each later payment, how many days an invoice has to be paid in, and what happens when an invoice goes unpaid — pause the work, charge interest, or something else. Also confirm that M-PESA and bank transfer are the payment methods, decide whether prices are quoted in Kenyan shillings only, and whether VAT applies to them.

Money others charge. Domains, hosting, app store fees, paid plugins and similar costs are yours, and we would rather you bought them in your own name than have them sitting in ours. If we pay one on your behalf, it appears on your invoice at cost. How these behave when a project is cancelled is on the refunds page.

Most projects that run late run late for the same reason: the text never arrived, or nobody could find the login for the domain. So, plainly, we need:

• Words and pictures you have the right to use. If you send us an image, we take it that you own it or are licensed to use it.
• Access to the accounts we have to touch — domain, hosting, anything we are connecting to.
• One person who can make decisions and answer questions. A committee is welcome, but somebody has to be able to say yes.

We will chase, because a project stalled for a month helps nobody. But a week of waiting is a week added, and that is not a penalty, it is arithmetic.

Ferrin must decide what happens to a project that goes quiet for a long stretch — how many weeks of silence before it is treated as paused or closed, and what it costs to restart it.

You see the work every week on a real link rather than in a slide, which means you change your mind early, when changing it is cheap. That is the design of the process, not a failure of it.

Moving a button, rewriting a heading, trying a second colour — that is the job. A new page nobody mentioned, a payment integration that was never in the scope, or a redesign of something already agreed and built is different: we will tell you what it adds in time and money, and you decide whether you want it.

If you say no, the original scope carries on unharmed. Nobody sulks.

This is the part of the studio we care most about. You are not renting your own website.

• Yours on full payment: the code written for your project, the design made for it, your content, your data, and every account set up in your name.
• Yours already: anything you gave us — your brand, your copy, your photographs, your logo.
• Ours: our general knowledge, the reusable pieces we bring to every project, and our own products. NOXERA, the studio's AI assistant, is ours; if a project uses it, you get a licence to use it, not ownership of it.
• Nobody's: open source libraries come with their own licences, which attach to the code and travel with it. Those licences outrank this page.

Showing the work. We would like to put your project on the work page. We ask first, and you can say no, or say yes and change your mind later. Some work can only ever be shown anonymised, and where that is true we say so on the page itself.

Ferrin must decide whether ownership transfers at final payment or at handover when those are different days, and whether a client who later stops paying for care keeps the same rights. Say it in one sentence.

Handover is a real event, not an email that says “it is live”. It includes the code in a repository you control, the hosting and domain in your name, every credential we were using, and a walkthrough of how the thing works — recorded or live, whichever suits you.

We do not keep a back door, we do not keep your site hostage on our hosting account, and we do not charge you to be given what you have already paid for.

Ferrin must decide whether there is a warranty window after handover during which bugs in what we built are fixed at no charge, and how long it runs. State the length, and say clearly that it covers our defects rather than new features.

Software needs looking after — updates, backups, small fixes, the occasional thing that breaks because a service it depends on changed. We offer that monthly, and you are free to do it yourself or have somebody else do it. That is fine.

Cancelling care does not take your site down, does not remove your access and does not delete anything. Everything is already in your name by then. See the refunds page for what happens to the month you have already paid for.

Ferrin must decide what a care month actually includes — hours, response time, what counts as a fix rather than a new feature — and how much notice either side gives to stop it. Without that, “care” is a word rather than a service.

We test on bad networks, small phones and interrupted connections before we ship, because that is the Kenya most of your users are actually on. What we will not do is claim perfection:

• Bugs happen. We fix ours. What is covered free and for how long is the warranty question in section 07.
• Uptime. We do not guarantee a percentage unless it is written into your agreement, because the servers belong to somebody else.
• Other people's services. Payment providers, SMS gateways, mapping, hosting, app stores and AI providers change their rules, their prices and their behaviour without asking us. We will tell you and adapt; we cannot control them.
• Search rankings and results. We build sites that are fast and readable by search engines. Nobody honest promises a position on Google, or a number of sales.

Every contract of this kind puts a limit on liability. It protects a small studio from being ended by one bad afternoon, and it tells you honestly what the worst case looks like before you sign. Both of those matter, so the number has to be real and it has to be agreed, not slipped into a web page.

Ferrin must decide, with legal advice, the liability cap — commonly the fees paid for the project — and what sits outside the cap. Some things cannot be limited by law at all, and a lawyer must say which ones those are in Kenya.

What we can commit to now, plainly: if we break something we built, we fix it, and we do not disappear while it is broken.

Projects end early for ordinary reasons — budgets move, businesses change direction, sometimes two people simply are not a good fit. Nobody has to explain themselves, and there is no trap at the exit.

If you stop: you pay for work completed up to that point, and we hand over what exists. Half a project is still yours.

If we stop: we hand over what exists and settle up the same way. The money side of both is on the refunds page.

We would end a project early if we were asked to build something illegal, something designed to deceive people, or something that mistreats the people who use it.

Ferrin must decide the notice period for ending work mid project, and how “work completed” is measured when the project was priced as a whole rather than by the hour.

The studio is in Nairobi and works under Kenyan law. Anything to do with personal data also has to keep the Data Protection Act 2019, which is on the privacy page.

Before anybody involves a lawyer, we talk. Most disagreements in this line of work are a misunderstanding about scope, and a conversation fixes them in an afternoon.

Ferrin must decide the venue for a dispute that a conversation cannot fix: the Kenyan courts, or arbitration in Nairobi, and under whose rules. Decide too what happens with a client outside Kenya, which is the case that catches small studios out.

If a court ever decided one part of a signed agreement was invalid, the rest of it should still stand. A lawyer will phrase that properly.