Managed website terms

These terms apply to a managed website — one we build for you with no build fee, then host, look after and keep up to date for a monthly payment. They are between you and Software Builders Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales, company number 17431696, whose registered office is 66 Chertsey Road, Windlesham, England, GU20 6HP. We trade as Foundation. "We", "us" and "our" mean Software Builders Ltd. "You" and "your" mean the person or business taking the plan.

They are written to be read. Where a sentence has to be precise it is precise, but we would rather you understood this than be impressed by it. **Section 2 matters more than the rest** — it is the part that says who owns what. If any of it is unclear, ask us before you agree to it.

1. What the plan includes

For the monthly payment we:

• Build you a website. There is no build fee. We design and build it, write it into shape around what you tell us about your business, and put your words and pictures on it.
• Host it on our own server, with an HTTPS certificate fitted and renewed before it expires, nightly backups kept away from the machine they came from, security updates applied as they are released, and monitoring so that we generally know something is down before you do.
• Put it where you want it. London or New York — you choose at sign-up, and if you would rather not think about it we use the one matching your billing address and tell you which. If you are in the UK and choose New York, your site's data (including anything your customers send you through it) is held outside the UK; that is yours to decide, and your own privacy notice should account for it. We will not move it afterwards without telling you first.
• Set it up to be found locally — the search work described in section 5.
• Keep it up to date. Changes and amendments as described in section 4.
• Answer you. A real person, and the same person who built it.

Add-ons

Four things can be added to the plan, each £15 a month on top:

• Online booking — appointments and slots people book themselves, with confirmations and reminders by email.
• Take payments — sell a few products, or take a deposit up front. Card details go to Stripe and never reach us or you.
• Customer login area — your customers sign in to see their own quotes, documents or job progress.
• Extra pages — another town or another service, beyond the pages the plan includes.

You can choose them when you sign up or ask for one at any time, and you can drop one the same way. They are charged monthly alongside the plan and they stop when you stop. An add-on is part of the website and is covered by everything in these terms, section 2 included — it is ours in the same way the rest of the site is.

What the plan does not include, with or without add-ons, is a second website, a mobile app, or a bespoke system built around how your business works. Those are different things rather than larger versions of this one. We are happy to build them and we will quote them separately under our build terms.

We do not have to host anything. We may decline or stop hosting material that is unlawful, that puts our other customers at risk, or that we reasonably believe will damage our servers or our reputation. Where we can, we will tell you first and give you a chance to put it right.

2. What you own, and what we own

This is a rental, not a purchase. It is why there is no build fee, and it is the most important thing on this page.

Ours

The website itself is ours — the design, the layout, the code, the templates and components it is built from, and the work we did to make it. You are not buying it. While your plan is running you have a licence to use it as your business's website, which is everything you actually need in order to use it. That licence ends when the plan ends.

Yours

Your content is yours, and always was. That means:

• Your words — anything you wrote or gave us to put on the site.
• Your pictures — your photographs, your logo, your branding.
• Your business information — your prices, your opening hours, your services, your reviews.
• Your customers' details — every enquiry, booking or message the site has taken for you. Those belong to you and to the people who sent them, never to us. Section 8 says how we look after them.
• Your domain name. Registered in your name from the start, as section 3 explains, and yours whatever happens to the plan.

We will give all of that back, in a form you can use, whenever you ask — during the plan or after it. There is no charge for it and nothing is held back.

What happens if you stop paying

The website goes offline. Not held to ransom, not deleted in a hurry — switched off, because the licence to use it has ended and it was never yours to take elsewhere.

In plain terms, at the end of the month you have paid for:

• The site stops being reachable at your domain.
• You keep your domain and can point it anywhere you like, including at a new site built by somebody else.
• You keep your content and your customer data, and we send it over.
• You do not keep the website — not the design, not the code, not the files that made it work. There is nothing for us to hand over on that side, and asking will not change the answer.
• We keep a backup for 30 days in case you change your mind, and delete it after that.

If that is not what you want, do not take this plan. Buy the site instead: £250 and it is yours outright, on your own hosting if you prefer, with no monthly payment to us at all. Section 7 covers changing your mind later, and you can do that at any point.

3. Price, payment, and the £15

£50 a month, and £15 once at the start for your domain name. Any add-ons from section 1 are £15 a month each on top.

Software Builders Ltd is not registered for VAT, so the price you see is the price you pay and no VAT is added. If we become VAT-registered we will tell you before any VAT is charged.

About the word "free". There is no build fee — that is what free means here, and it is the only thing it means. You are paying £15 to start and £50 every month, and the site is ours rather than yours. We would rather say that plainly on every page than have you find it out in month three.

The £15

It buys your domain name, registered for a year, in your name. We register it for you and connect it to the site.

• It is charged once, at sign-up, alongside your first month.
• The domain is yours, not ours. It stays yours if you leave, and it is listed with you as the registrant rather than us.
• If you already own a domain, you do not pay it. Say so when you sign up, tell us the name, and we will connect the one you have. There is nothing else to pay and no catch in doing it that way.
• Renewals after the first year are included in the monthly payment for as long as the plan runs. If the plan ends, renewing it is yours to do — and worth doing, because a lapsed domain is harder to get back than a website.

If the name you want is already taken or is a premium domain the registrar charges more than £15 for, we will tell you before anything is registered and you can pick another or pay the difference. We do not add a mark-up.

The free trial

This applies only when the sign-up page offers a free trial. If it does not, skip to the next part: everything is charged at sign-up as it describes.

• Nothing is charged at sign-up — not the monthly payment and not the £15. We take your card details through Stripe so we can start building, and the first payment is taken when the trial ends. The length of the trial is shown on the sign-up page and in your confirmation email.
• You will see the finished site before you pay. We email you a link to it when it is built, and you will always have at least two full days with it before the first payment. If we finish later than that, we move the payment date back to make sure of it, and the email tells you the new date.
• The £15 is added to your first payment, and we register the domain once that payment has gone through, not before.
• Cancel before the trial ends and you pay nothing. No domain is registered, the site is taken down, and anything you sent us is yours to have back.
• One free trial per business. We may decline a second one.

The monthly payment

• The first payment is taken when you sign up — or when your free trial ends, if you had one — and the same amount on the same date each month after that.
• Payments are handled by Stripe. Your card details go to Stripe and never reach us; we can see the last four digits and the expiry date, and nothing else.
• You can change your card or cancel at any time through the billing link in your confirmation email, without contacting us.

If a payment fails, Stripe will retry it over the following days and we will email you. If it has not been paid after 21 days we may take the site offline until it is. We will tell you before we do, and putting it back once you have paid costs nothing.

The price can change, but not often and never quietly. We will give you at least 30 days' notice by email, and you can cancel before it takes effect if you would rather not accept it.

4. Changes and amendments

Changing the site is the point of the plan, not an extra. New prices, a new photograph, different opening hours, a staff change, a new service, seasonal wording, a page that needs rewriting — ask, and we do it.

How it works in practice:

• Email us what you want changed. There is no ticket system and no form.
• Small things are usually same working day, and bigger ones within a few.
• There is no monthly limit, because counting them would be a worse experience than the odd busy month is for us.

What that does not stretch to is a new thing pretending to be a change. Booking, payments, a customer login and extra pages are the add-ons in section 1, at £15 a month each — ask and we will add one. A second site, a mobile app, or a rebuild from scratch because the business has changed direction are new work under our build terms, quoted before anything starts. We will say so at the time rather than silently absorbing it or silently refusing.

We can decline a change that would break the site, that we think is unlawful or misleading, or that is really a new build. We will explain why and suggest what we can do instead.

5. Being found locally

We set your site up so that people searching for a business like yours in your area can find it. That means:

• Pages written around what you do and where you do it, so the site answers the search rather than just existing.
• A Google Business Profile set up or tidied up, connected to the site, with your details, hours, services and photographs consistent between the two.
• Structured data describing your business, your services and your area, so search engines and AI assistants can answer questions about you correctly instead of guessing.
• The technical side — a site that loads fast, works properly on a phone, has a sitemap, and does not trip over itself.
• Ongoing attention. We keep an eye on it and adjust as things move.

What we cannot do is promise a position. Nobody can. Google decides what ranks and changes its mind regularly, your competitors are doing this too, and anyone who guarantees you first place is either misunderstanding it or lying to you. What we promise is the work above, done properly and kept up — not an outcome we do not control.

We also do not do, and will not sell you, anything that tries to trick a search engine. It works for a while and then costs you everything.

6. What we need from you

The plan only works if we can get hold of what the site needs:

• The information about your business — what you do, where, your hours, your prices if you want them shown.
• Your words and pictures, or a clear steer that you would like us to write and source them.
• Answers when we ask, within a reasonable time. We are not going to chase you, but a site cannot be finished around a question nobody answers.
• The right to use what you send us. You confirm that your text, photographs, logo and anything else you give us are yours to give, and that putting them online does not breach anyone else's rights. If a claim arises from something you supplied, that one is yours.
• Access to your domain, if you already own one, so we can point it at the site.

Your content stays your responsibility. We will tell you if something looks legally risky, but we are not your solicitor and we do not check your claims about your own business.

7. Buying it outright

You can stop renting and own it instead, at any time. The price is £250, the same as buying the site from us in the first place.

When you pay it:

• The website becomes yours — the design, the code, the files. We assign the rights in it to you properly, in writing.
• You can take it anywhere. We will hand over everything in a form another developer or host can use, and help them get it running.
• The monthly plan stops, unless you want to keep hosting with us — which is then £18 a month on our ordinary hosting terms, with no tie.
• Nothing is deducted for what you have already paid, and nothing is added for how long you have been with us. £250, the same figure either way.

What stays ours even then is the same thing that stays ours on any build: the general-purpose tools and components we bring to every project. You get a perpetual, worldwide, irrevocable licence to use those as part of your site, including after you have moved it elsewhere or had somebody else work on it. That is the normal arrangement and it is set out in our build terms.

8. Your data, and your customers' data

For your own details — your name, your email, what you are paying, what we have built for you — we are the controller. Our [privacy notice](/privacy/) says what we hold, why, and for how long.

For the people who contact you through your site — their enquiries, their bookings, their messages — **you are the controller and we are your processor**. The data is yours; we hold it on your behalf and act on your instructions. In practice:

• We process it only to run your site and only on your instructions.
• We keep it confidential and take appropriate security measures around it.
• We tell you without undue delay if we become aware of a breach affecting it.
• We help you answer anyone exercising their rights over it.
• We give it to you whenever you ask, in a usable form.
• When the plan ends we send it to you and then delete our copies, other than the 30-day backup in section 2.
• We will not use it for our own purposes, and we will never sell it.

If your site collects anything beyond ordinary contact details, tell us at the start so we can set it up properly.

9. Starting straight away, and your right to cancel

If you are a consumer — buying as an individual rather than for a business — you normally have 14 days to cancel a contract made online, under the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013.

Because we start building as soon as you sign up, two things follow:

• By signing up you are asking us to begin immediately, inside the 14 days.
• You keep the right to cancel during those 14 days, but you will owe us a fair amount for what we have already done — in practice the month you have paid for, and the £15 if the domain has been registered, because that one has gone to the registrar and cannot be unwound.

If you would rather have the full 14 days untouched, say so when you sign up and we will simply wait before starting.

If you signed up with a free trial, cancelling before it ends costs nothing at all, because nothing has been charged and no domain has been registered.

None of this affects your statutory rights, including under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 — services performed with reasonable care and skill, within a reasonable time, and as described.

10. Cancelling

Any time, no notice, no fee. Use the billing link in your confirmation email and it stops at the end of the month you have paid for. Nobody will ring you to ask why.

What happens then is section 2: the site goes offline, you keep your domain, your content and your customer data, and you do not keep the website. Please read that section before you sign up rather than after you cancel.

We can cancel too, on 30 days' notice by email, and we will refund any part month you have paid for. We would only do that if the plan stopped making sense for us, and we would help you move. We can stop sooner if you do not pay, if you use the site unlawfully, or if you are abusive to us.

11. Backups, uptime and what we do not promise

Backups are taken nightly and kept away from the machine they came from. We keep the last 30 days. If something is lost we will restore from the most recent good backup — which means the worst case is losing a day, not everything. Backups are a safety net rather than a promise that nothing will ever go wrong.

Uptime. We aim for the site to be available all the time, and it very nearly always is. We do not offer a guaranteed uptime percentage or service credits at this price, and you should not treat this as one. Planned work that needs the site down happens outside working hours and we tell you first.

12. Our liability

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be limited.

Subject to that:

• We are liable to you for up to the total amount you have paid us under this plan in the 12 months before the claim. This is a low monthly fee and that is the risk it can reasonably carry.
• We are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, or for loss of profit, revenue, business, goodwill, anticipated savings or data — except that nothing here affects our obligations under section 2 or section 8.
• We are not liable for your content, or for what happens if your domain lapses after the plan ends.
• We are not liable for where you appear in search results, for the reasons in section 5.
• We are not liable for third-party failures outside our reasonable control, including at our server provider, a payment provider, a domain registrar, Google, or the networks in between — although we will do what we reasonably can to put things right.

If you are a consumer, this section does not affect your statutory rights.

13. Contact

Email hello@foundationbuilds.com. A person reads it, usually the same working day — and it is the same person who would be building it.

Software Builders Ltd, trading as Foundation
66 Chertsey Road, Windlesham, England, GU20 6HP
Company number 17431696

The small print about the small print

• We may update these terms. If a change materially affects you we will give you at least 30 days' notice by email, and you can cancel before it takes effect if you would rather not accept it. Each version is numbered and dated at the top of this page, and we record which version you agreed to and when.
• These terms are the whole agreement between us about your managed website, and replace anything said beforehand. A build you buy outright has its own terms, and so does hosting on its own.
• If any part turns out to be unenforceable, the rest continues to apply.
• Delay is not waiver. If we do not enforce something straight away, we have not given up the right to enforce it later.
• Neither of us is liable for failures outside our reasonable control, though we will each tell the other promptly and do what we reasonably can.
• Nobody else can enforce these terms — only you and us.
• English law applies, and the courts of England and Wales have exclusive jurisdiction.