Terms & Conditions

1. Who You Are Agreeing With

WebMonterey is a California limited liability company operating as WebMonterey LLC from Monterey, California, and holding a City of Monterey business licence. "We", "us" and "I" mean WebMonterey LLC. "You" means the person or business using this site or engaging us for work.

Using this website means you accept these terms. Engaging us for paid work means you accept these terms together with the written proposal for that work.

2. The Written Proposal Comes First

Every project starts with a written proposal setting out what is being built, what it costs, what the payment schedule is, and what is not included. That proposal is the specific agreement; these terms are the general one.

Where the two disagree, the proposal wins. Nothing said in conversation, email or on this website changes a proposal unless it is put in writing and both sides agree to it.

3. What We Do

We design, develop, maintain and advise on websites, and build the web applications and automated workflows that grow out of them. The scope of any particular engagement is whatever the proposal says it is.

Work outside that scope is quoted before it starts, or billed at the hourly rate in section 4 where you have asked for it.

4. Fees and Payment

Plan rates are published on this site and confirmed in your proposal, along with the payment schedule and any deposit.

Work your plan does not cover is billed at $60 per hour. Anything substantial is quoted before it starts — we will not do additional billable work and present you with the invoice afterwards.

Invoices are payable on the terms shown on the invoice. If an account falls significantly overdue we may pause ongoing work until it is settled; we will tell you before we do, not after.

5. Plan Term and Renewal

Ongoing plans run for a term of one year. At the end of the term you decide whether to renew, and choosing not to renew carries no penalty and no exit fee.

How the term is billed, and what happens if a plan ends before the term is up, are set out in your proposal.

However a plan ends, we do not hold your site, your code or your domain against an unpaid invoice or a decision not to renew. The handover in the next section applies either way.

6. Client Portal Access

Where your engagement includes access to our client portal, we issue you an account for it. Portal access is part of the service, not a separate product, and it exists for as long as the engagement does.

Your credentials are yours to keep secure, and you are responsible for what happens under your account. Tell us straight away if you think it has been compromised and we will lock it.

Accounts are for one person. If more than one person on your side needs access, ask and we will issue more — sharing one login makes it impossible to tell who did what.

We may suspend access to protect the service, the information in it, or another client. If we do, we will tell you why rather than leave you locked out wondering.

When an engagement ends, portal access ends with it. We will tell you before it is removed and give you a reasonable opportunity to download what is yours — see the next section for what that is.

7. What You Own

You own your website. On full payment for the work, the custom code written for your project and the content you supplied are yours, and your domain is registered in your name.

While we manage it, your site lives in a Git repository and is deployed through our Cloudflare account. That is what allows hosting, the CDN, SSL and DDoS protection to be part of your plan rather than four accounts you administer yourself. The arrangement is ours; the site running on it is yours.

When an engagement ends we hand the repository over to you. There is no licence to keep paying for and no proprietary platform underneath it, so the site can be deployed wherever you choose.

We keep ownership of our own general tools, methods and reusable components, and of anything built before or outside your project. That does not restrict your use of your site.

Third-party components — frameworks, libraries, fonts, hosting — remain under their own licences, which carry through to you.

8. What You Provide

You provide the content: text, images, logos, and access to the accounts we need. You confirm that you own that material or have permission to use it, and that it is accurate and lawful.

We rely on that confirmation. If material you supply infringes someone else's rights, that is your responsibility, not ours.

Projects need your input to move. Where a project stalls waiting on content or approvals, the timeline moves with it.

9. Third-Party Services

Your site depends on services we do not control — hosting, the domain registrar, payment processors, email delivery, analytics, and the libraries the site is built on. Each is governed by its own terms, and each can change its pricing, its features or its availability without consulting us.

We choose these services carefully and we will tell you what your site depends on, but we cannot be responsible for an outage, a price change or a policy change at a provider.

10. Availability, Backups and Support

Where your plan includes monitoring, backups and updates, we perform them on the schedule described in your proposal, and a real person answers when something breaks.

We do not guarantee uninterrupted availability. No website is immune to a host outage, an attack, or an upstream failure. Any specific uptime or response-time commitment only exists if it is written into your proposal.

Backups are a safety net, not a guarantee of recovery. Keep your own copy of anything you cannot afford to lose.

11. Warranties and Liability

We do the work carefully and to a professional standard. Beyond that, this website and our services are provided as they are, without any other warranty, express or implied.

To the fullest extent the law allows, our total liability arising out of or relating to any engagement is limited to the fees you paid us for that engagement in the twelve months before the claim. We are not liable for lost profits, lost revenue, lost data or other indirect or consequential losses.

Nothing in these terms limits liability that cannot lawfully be limited.

12. Privacy and Cookies

This site sets a cookie to record your privacy choices, and loads nothing from a third party until you have consented to that category. You can change your choice at any time using the Cookies link in the footer.

We honour the Global Privacy Control signal. If your browser sends it, analytics and marketing are switched off automatically and you are not asked again.

13. Changes to These Terms

We may update these terms. The current version always lives at this address, and the date at the top of this page changes when the wording does.

Material changes affecting active clients will be raised with them directly rather than left to be discovered here.

14. Governing Law

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of California. Any dispute will be brought in the state or federal courts serving Monterey County, California.

Before anyone files anything, talk to us. Most of what ends up in front of a lawyer was a conversation that did not happen.

15. Contact

Questions about these terms, or about anything on this site, go to hello@webmonterey.com.

WebMonterey LLC, Monterey, California.