Terms of service

These terms cover everything Brightspire (ABN 11 702 842 113) does: website development projects, ad-hoc work (including audits, email authentication, and support), support retainers, hosting, domains, and WordPress maintenance. Part 1 applies to all of it. Parts 2 to 6 apply to the specific service you’re using.

You won’t find complicated legal jargon here. These terms exist so we both know who does what, when, and what happens if things go wrong.

Your proposal, quote, or confirmation email sets out the specifics of your engagement (scope, price, inclusions) and is read together with these terms. If the two conflict, the proposal wins. You accept these terms by accepting a quote, paying an invoice, or continuing to use a service. The version that applies is the one in effect when your engagement was confirmed; for ongoing services, we’ll give you notice of material changes, and continuing past that notice is acceptance.

The agreement

You confirm you have authority to enter this agreement for yourself, your company, or your organisation. You agree to give us what we need to do the work (text, images, access credentials) when we need it, to review work and give feedback in a timely way, and to stick to the payment schedule.

We confirm we have the experience and ability to do the work you’ve hired us for. We’ll carry it out professionally, aim to meet agreed deadlines, and tell you as soon as possible if we expect a delay.

Quotes and payment

All prices are in Australian dollars and exclude GST unless stated otherwise. GST is added to invoices as required by law.

Invoices are due within 14 days unless we’ve agreed otherwise in writing. If an invoice is overdue we may pause work, withhold deliverables or credentials, and, after reasonable notice, suspend services we provide to you (including a hosted site) until payment is received. We don’t usually charge interest; we do expect prompt payment.

If an invoice stays unpaid well past its due date despite reminders, or we can no longer reach you, we may end the engagement or service. For hosted services that means the site comes down and data is deleted on the usual schedule (see Hosting and domains). Ending a service doesn’t cancel the debt: unpaid amounts remain payable, along with reasonable costs of recovering them. Please keep your contact and billing details current; invoices sent to the details you’ve given us count as delivered.

Intellectual property

You keep full ownership of everything you give us: content, data, logos, branding, images. You guarantee you have the rights to use those materials, and you indemnify us against claims arising from our use of them as you directed.

Once a project or task is paid in full, we assign to you the copyright in the custom code, templates, and design elements we created specifically for your project. The site is yours to keep, change, host elsewhere, or hand to another developer, and nothing is held back to keep you with us. Until payment is complete, that work remains ours and is licensed to you for review only.

Three things sit outside that assignment. Pre-existing code, tools, snippets, and processes we bring to every project stay ours, and you get a perpetual, non-exclusive, royalty-free licence to keep using them as part of your site. Open-source software (WordPress, Shopify themes and apps, plugins, frameworks, and libraries) stays under its own licence, which usually already lets you use, change, and redistribute it. Third-party services and licences are covered below. We may also reuse general techniques, know-how, and non-client-specific components in other work, as long as we don’t reuse anything confidential or identifiably yours.

We’ll hand over the files you need to run the site; please store your own copies, as we’re not obliged to keep backups of project files indefinitely.

Unless you ask us not to, we may show work we’ve done for you in our portfolio and case studies, and place a small credit link in the footer of sites we build. On white-label work we stay out of sight: no footer credit, and no direct contact with your client unless you ask for it.

Confidentiality

Anything confidential you share with us stays confidential, is used only to do the work, and isn’t disclosed to anyone except as required by law. If you need an NDA signed, we’re happy to review and sign a reasonable one.

Liability

Nothing in these terms excludes rights you have under the Australian Consumer Law or any other law that can’t be excluded. Where the law lets us limit a remedy, our liability for a failure is limited to resupplying the service or paying to have it resupplied.

Beyond that, our total liability for any claim connected to a service is limited to the fees you actually paid us for that service, and we’re not liable for indirect or consequential loss (lost profits, lost data, lost revenue, lost opportunities). We’re also not liable for problems caused by materials you provided, third-party products and services we don’t manage, pre-existing issues on sites we didn’t build, or events beyond our reasonable control.

We don’t guarantee search engine rankings, traffic, or sales. We build well and follow good practice; results depend on more than we control.

Third-party services and licences

Some work relies on third-party services and licences: plugins, fonts, stock images, payment gateways, email services, and the like. We’ll recommend options and help set them up, but unless your quote says otherwise, you’re responsible for purchasing them, and their ongoing costs and terms are between you and the provider.

Subcontractors

Occasionally we bring in trusted contractors for specialised work. They work under the same confidentiality and privacy standards we do.

Termination

Either of us can end an engagement. If you end it, you pay for all work completed to that date; deposits are non-refundable. We can end it if invoices go unpaid after reasonable notice, if you materially breach these terms and don’t fix it, or if you become insolvent. Either way, once completed work is paid for, we hand over the files you own.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of Victoria, Australia. If a dispute comes up, we both agree to try to sort it out directly and in good faith first. If we can’t within 30 days, either of us can pursue the usual legal remedies. If any clause is found invalid, the rest still stand.

These terms, together with your proposal, quote, or confirmation, are the whole agreement between us and replace any earlier discussions or arrangements about the same work.

Scope and process

Your proposal defines what we’re building. Our usual workflow runs through planning, design, development, testing, and deployment, with your feedback and approval at key milestones.

For full projects, the payment schedule is set out in your proposal. Typically that’s a commencement deposit (often 50%) due on acceptance, before work begins, with the remaining stages in your proposal (for example development, QA, deployment) invoiced individually as each is completed. Any final balance is due before launch or handover.

Content

Unless content creation is quoted, you provide all text, images, and data, in the formats we ask for. We’ll populate key templates and sample pages for design approval; populating the rest (all the blog posts, products, or portfolio items) is your job unless your quote says otherwise. Stock image licences are yours to purchase; we’re happy to suggest libraries or quote to handle it.

Approvals

At key stages we’ll give you work to review (a staging link or design files) and a reasonable window to respond, usually 5 to 10 business days. If we don’t hear back within that window, we may treat the stage as approved so the project keeps moving, and invoice accordingly. Once you give final approval, the balance is due and later changes are variations.

Changes and variations

Anything outside the scope in your proposal is a variation: new pages or features, significant design changes after approval, substantial extra content work. We’ll flag it, explain the impact on time and cost, and get your written OK (email is fine) before doing it. Variations are charged at our standard hourly rate. Urgent work outside business hours, or work that means rescheduling other commitments, may attract our priority rate, agreed in writing first.

Browser testing

We test in current versions of Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge on desktop, and recent iOS Safari and Android Chrome on mobile. We aim for an experience appropriate to each device, not pixel-identical rendering. Older or less common browsers are tested only if quoted.

E-commerce

For stores, you’re responsible for your payment gateways and their fees, PCI DSS compliance where applicable, shipping and tax configuration, your customer-facing policies (privacy, terms of sale, refunds), and compliance with the laws that apply to your selling. You indemnify us against claims arising from your commerce activities.

Sites we didn’t build

If we work on a site built by someone else, we’re not responsible for pre-existing issues in its code or setup. We’ll work within what’s there; if inherited problems need fixing before we can proceed, we’ll discuss the cost with you first.

Warranty

We provide a 30-day warranty from launch or handover. It covers fixing bugs and defects in the features we built, so they work as scoped. It doesn’t cover new features, changes requested after handover, issues caused by you or a third party changing the code, third-party software updates after the warranty ends, hosting or domain issues outside a service we provide, or browsers we didn’t test. If you or a third party are given admin or code access and change things, the remaining warranty on the affected work is void. After 30 days we’re still here; further work is quoted or charged hourly, and our maintenance plans cover ongoing care.

Delays

If a project stalls on our side, we’ll tell you why and give a revised timeline. If it stalls on your side (late content, feedback, or approvals), the timeline shifts, and significant delays may mean rescheduling around our other commitments, occasionally with a rescheduling fee we’d discuss first.

This part covers work requested outside a project or retainer: content updates, fixes, small improvements, troubleshooting, site audits, email authentication work, once-off maintenance passes, and general advice about your site.

Ad-hoc work is quoted fixed-price or charged at our standard hourly rate, billed with a one-hour minimum and then in 15-minute increments, and invoiced on completion or monthly. Urgent or after-hours work may attract the priority rate, agreed before we start.

Audits are reports, not fixes. An audit describes what we found and what we recommend; acting on it is separate work, quoted once the findings are known. We don’t guarantee any particular outcome from following an audit’s recommendations, or from email authentication work (rankings, traffic, speed scores, or deliverability), because those depend on more than the site. For email authentication, what we stand behind is the setup: every sending service we find authenticated, and a DMARC policy that tells receiving mail providers to refuse or junk mail faking your domain. The major providers act on that policy, but how any provider handles a given message is up to them.

The free WordPress health check is a short report on what needs attention, based on the information you send us and checks we run from outside the site. It isn’t a full audit, it doesn’t change anything on your site, and there’s no obligation to have us do any of the work.

At the standard rate, ad-hoc work is scheduled around our project and retainer commitments, so response times aren’t guaranteed. Priority and emergency rates, with their response targets, are listed on the support page and agreed before we start. If your site needs reserved hours and predictable turnaround, that’s what a retainer is for (Part 4). The “sites we didn’t build” clause in Part 2 applies to ad-hoc work too.

A retainer reserves a set number of hours each month for your site: development, content updates, and support. Your confirmation email sets the hours, monthly fee, and start date, and is read together with this part. Paying the first invoice is acceptance of the arrangement.

• Retainers are billed at the start of each month, in advance, and the fee is non-refundable. Work may pause if payment is late.
• Unused hours aren’t carried over. We’ll suggest useful tasks if hours are going spare, and logging tasks early in the month helps us use them well.
• Our standard hours are 9am to 5pm Melbourne time, Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays.
• Feedback, revisions, testing, and QA time count toward the monthly hours.
• Emergency work counts at 2 times hours taken during standard hours, and 2.5 times outside them, unless the emergency was caused by our hosting or our work.
• Work beyond the monthly hours is billed at our standard hourly rate, with your approval first.
• Projects too large for the monthly hours are quoted separately.
• Retainers run for a minimum of 3 months and renew automatically. Either of us can cancel or change the arrangement with 2 months’ notice.

What managed hosting is

Managed hosting is a management service. We manage the running of your site: configuration, deployment, SSL certificates, DNS records we control, backups, monitoring, software updates at the server or platform level, and responding when something goes wrong. Your plan confirmation sets out your specific inclusions.

Moving an existing site onto our hosting is included. Problems the site already had are discussed and quoted before we fix them.

The infrastructure underneath depends on your plan. Managed shared and managed private hosting run on servers we operate. Managed headless hosting runs on serverless platforms operated by companies such as Cloudflare and Vercel. We choose reputable, well-run platforms, and we may move your site to an equivalent or better one with reasonable notice and no reduction in service.

Where responsibility sits

We’re responsible for how your site is deployed, configured, and maintained. The platforms and networks underneath are responsible for the infrastructure itself: the hardware, the network, and its global availability. If an upstream platform has an outage, we can’t fix their infrastructure, but we will work out what’s happening, keep you informed, and restore or redeploy your site as soon as the platform allows.

On headless plans in particular, your site also has to comply with the platform’s own terms and acceptable use policy, and we may need to act (including suspending a deployment) to keep our platform accounts in good standing.

Uptime guarantee

On managed shared and managed private hosting, we guarantee 99.9% availability of the hosting infrastructure in each calendar month. That means the server, its network connection, and the web, database, and mail services we run on it. If infrastructure availability in a month falls below 99.9%, you’re entitled to a credit on your next hosting invoice:

• Below 99.9%: 10% of that month’s hosting fee
• Below 99.0%: 25%
• Below 95.0%: 50%

Credits are capped at one month’s hosting fee, are applied against future hosting fees rather than paid as cash, and are your sole remedy for downtime. To claim one, email us within 30 days of the end of the month in question. Availability is measured by our own monitoring, which checks each server every minute.

The guarantee covers the infrastructure we run, not your website or the software on it. It doesn’t cover downtime caused by your site’s code, theme, plugins, or content; changes made by you or a third party; traffic or resource use beyond what your plan anticipates; DNS, domain, or email-provider problems outside our control; attacks, upstream network or provider failures, or other events beyond our reasonable control; suspension for non-payment or breach of acceptable use; or scheduled maintenance we’ve given you notice of (kept short, and outside business hours where we can).

Managed headless hosting runs on third-party platforms, so it’s covered by those platforms’ own availability commitments rather than this guarantee. On every plan, we’ll tell you what happened when something goes down, and work to restore your site as quickly as the situation allows.

Monitoring and out-of-hours response

Our monitoring runs around the clock. If a server we run goes down, or a hosted site stops responding, we’re alerted within a minute and will look at it when the alert comes in, outside business hours included, and keep you informed while it’s being fixed. Everything else (requests, changes, and problems with the site itself rather than the infrastructure) is handled in business hours, or under the priority and emergency rates in Parts 3 and 4.

Backups

On shared and private hosting, backups are taken at least daily and kept for the period your plan sets out, and we’ll restore from backup on request. Headless sites are rebuilt from their code repository, and their content is kept by your CMS provider under its own backup arrangements. Backups are a safety net, not an archive: they can occasionally fail or be incomplete, so keep your own copies of source content and anything you can’t afford to lose.

Acceptable use

Hosted sites must be lawful. No malware, phishing, spam, scraping infrastructure, or crypto mining, and nothing that infringes others’ rights. If a site consistently uses far more resources than its plan anticipates, we’ll talk to you about options before doing anything. We can suspend a service for abuse, legal requirement, or non-payment after reasonable notice; suspension for serious abuse can be immediate.

Domains

Domains we register or manage for you are registered in your name. You own your domain, always. Renewals are billed ahead of the renewal date; if a renewal invoice goes unpaid after reminders, the domain can lapse, which we can’t always undo. Registrations and renewals are non-refundable once processed, and registry approval and transfer timing are outside our control. You can transfer your domain away at any time once your account is settled.

Billing and cancellation

Hosting is billed in advance, monthly or annually per your plan. Price changes come with at least 30 days’ notice. You can cancel with 30 days’ written notice. Annual plans are paid in advance for the year and aren’t refunded if you cancel partway through; the service runs to the end of the paid period.

Your site is yours and built to move: when you leave, we hand over a full export of your site and content, and help point your domain wherever it’s going. Larger migration work is charged at our standard hourly rate. We delete hosted data, including backups, 30 days after a service ends, so take your copy before then.

Maintenance plans cover keeping WordPress updated: core, plugin, and theme updates on a regular schedule, compatibility checks, security monitoring, and backups, as set out in your plan. They don’t cover new features, redesigns, or content work, which are quoted separately or handled under a retainer.

Sites on a maintenance plan are monitored around the clock. If the site goes offline or is compromised, we’re alerted and will look at it when the alert comes in, outside business hours included. Recovery from a hack or a broken update is included where the plan says so; work beyond the plan’s scope, or caused by changes we didn’t make, is quoted first.

Sometimes a third-party plugin update breaks something. We’ll fix what we can within your plan’s scope; larger untangling is discussed and quoted before we proceed. For sites we didn’t build, we may recommend a review before starting a plan, and pre-existing issues are outside plan scope. If someone other than us changes the site’s code, we may need paid time to restore a known-good state before normal maintenance can continue.

Maintenance plans are billed monthly in advance. You can cancel with 30 days’ written notice; we don’t refund part-months, and the plan runs to the end of the paid period. If we also host the site, the plan is 20% off for as long as both services are active; if the hosting ends, the plan returns to its standard price from the next bill.

Questions about these terms: email chris@brightspire.com.au.