Terms

Summary of our standard terms, for information. Not an offer. Work is agreed only by a signed order.

Terms summary v1.0, 23 August 2026. Superseded versions are archived under /terms/archive/.

Business supply only. Not offered to consumers. Governed by the law of England and Wales.

The nine terms: Term 1 — Provenance, Term 2 — Cancellation, Term 3 — Your Time, Term 4 — Continuity, Term 5 — Rate, Term 6 — Acceptance, Term 7 — What You Send Me, Term 8 — Your Judgement and Term 9 — The Friday.

Terms 1 to 5 govern the monthly engagement. Terms 6 to 9 govern the Brief.

Term 1 — Provenance

One named engineer accountable. Nobody works on your system without you being told first — no silent substitution, no juniors on your budget. If a specialist is ever needed you get told who, before it happens, and you can say no.

Term 2 — Cancellation

Monthly. You can stop at the end of any month. No notice period, no minimum term, no termination fee. Anything already paid for gets finished or credited pro rata. Handover documentation and your credentials come back either way.

Neither side is obliged to offer or accept further work.

The signed contract governs. This page describes it.

Term 3 — Your Time

Your time budget: two hours a week. The engagement is designed to fit inside it.

One 45-minute domain session, written questions you answer when you like, one demo you can skip.

If a week needs more than that, I ask. You can say no — I will go and find the answer another way and flag the assumption I made.

Term 4 — Continuity

Continuity is provided for rather than promised: what a successor receives, and what happens to the contracting company itself, are both written down and testable.

Working hours are 08:00–17:00 CET. There is no on-call unless it is separately contracted, and the unavailability policy is published on this page, not settled case by case. The full account, technical and corporate, is further down this page.

Term 5 — Rate

EUR 20,000 per month. What the invoice counts is ownership of the technical roadmap plus its execution. You are buying that, not a quantity of time.

The price is held for twelve months from the start of the engagement. That is a ceiling on me, not a commitment from you: it is the price that cannot move for twelve months. The engagement itself is not a twelve-month commitment — billing runs monthly, and you can stop at the end of any month under Term 2 — Cancellation.

FX and receiving-bank charges are the buyer's side. The VAT position: Not registered for VAT. Stated response time: two working days.

Invoiced monthly in arrears. Intellectual property in the work transfers on payment of the invoice covering that work.

Arrears means the engagement itself is never paid ahead. Nothing is paid ahead on the Brief either: it is invoiced on delivery, so “already paid for” credits pro rata against the month of engagement work in progress and nothing else.

What this includes: the agreed scope, the domain session and written correspondence, and the handover pack. See Term 3 — Your Time and Term 4 — Continuity.

What this is not: 24/7 on-call. First-line support. A pair of hands inside your team’s ticket queue. Work I cannot put my name on.

Full MSA and DPA on request.

Term 6 — Acceptance

Every Brief is taken on or declined in writing, before there is an invoice. Nobody buys this by pressing a button and finding out later that I was the wrong person.

Sending me the messy version does not buy anything and does not commit you to anything. Within two working days you get one page — what I think you just said, in your words, and what would have to be true for that to be right — or a decline citing a numbered criterion. That page is free and it is yours whether or not you ever buy anything.

The Brief starts when you pick a week from the ones I offer you, confirmed in writing. Not when you press the button, and not when anyone pays anything.

The criteria I decline on are not published. A published filter teaches people how to pass it, and the box only works while what you write in it is unrehearsed. A decline names its criterion, owes you nothing, and tells you the date what you sent is deleted.

Term 7 — What You Send Me

I read it. Nobody else does.

I do not put what you send me into any AI tool. Not to summarise it, not to sort it, not to draft from it. The models I do use, on public source material, run on hardware I own and administer — ask and I will tell you which machines and where they physically are. The one thing in the path I do not control is my mail provider, which applies its own automated filtering to everything it carries, exactly like the one in front of your inbox.

During an engagement the default is different — frontier models for code, never your proprietary material — and you can switch it to local-only on request, at no extra cost, written into the DPA. The front door is stricter than the contract, deliberately, and I would rather say so than let you discover it.

If your side needs signed paper before you send anything, say so in one line and I will sign your NDA or send you mine the same day. You do not need one for the paragraph above to bind me.

Please do not paste anyone else’s personal data in here — customer lists, CVs, records. I do not want it and I have no basis to hold it. Describe it instead. If it arrives anyway I delete it and tell you I have.

Deletion dates are computed by a scheduled job, not by me remembering, and the email you get tells you the date.

Term 8 — Your Judgement

If you think I did not understand your business, tell me in one line inside ten working days after delivery and the invoice is cancelled. You do not have to justify it and I will not argue. You keep the document and the code either way, paid or not.

Nothing is paid before delivery, so there is nothing to send back: the invoice ships with the document, payment runs thirty days after delivery, and ten working days after delivery closes before any money is due.

If you invoke this, you keep what was delivered and you are on your own with it. That is what “you pay nothing” costs. If you intend to act on it, pay for it.

Term 9 — The Friday

If I am going to miss the Friday, you hear it from me ahead of it, not after. Then you choose: move the date once, in writing, or hold me to it. If the Friday passes and you have not heard from me, no invoice issues.

One thing outranks a Brief in progress: a live incident on a client’s running system. That is a permanent property of a one-person supplier, and it is why the notification above exists.

At any time before delivery, either of us can stop it with one line by email. Nothing is owed, nothing is invoiced, what you sent is deleted and the deletion is confirmed in writing the same day.

Intellectual property

Deal Baker Ltd assigns all intellectual property in the work to the client on payment of the invoice covering that work. Deal Baker Ltd warrants that it holds equivalent written agreements with every person who does development work on the engagement, so the chain of title runs unbroken from the keyboard to you. Those agreements are not named individually, and the warranty holds whether a line was typed by a person or produced by a tool that person operates and answers for.

The Brief is the exception, and it is an express one. On delivery you get a permanent, irrevocable, worldwide right to use the document and the code that ships with it, to copy them, change them and have them built from — including by somebody else. That right does not depend on the invoice being paid, which is what makes Term 8 — Your Judgement mean anything. What does not pass to you: the template and section structure I reuse, and the right to say somebody else wrote it.

Accountability

One named engineer accountable. Nobody works on your system without you being told first — no silent substitution, no juniors on your budget. If a specialist is ever needed you get told who, before it happens, and you can say no. That is Term 1 — Provenance.

Continuity, technical and corporate

Deal Baker Ltd (company 14906367, registered in England and Wales) is one engineer, so the bus factor is one. That is a property of the model, not an oversight, and both halves of it are answered here.

Nothing that matters lives anywhere you cannot reach without me. Code sits in your own repository organisation from day one. Infrastructure runs in your own cloud and vendor accounts wherever the vendor permits it. Credentials live in your own password manager, and you revoke them without asking anyone. Documentation lives in your own wiki, written as it goes.

Together those are the handover pack, and on top of them sits a written “if I am unavailable” runbook: what runs, where it runs, what breaks first, what to check, who to call. It is written for a competent engineer who has never met me and cannot ask me anything, because that is the only test of a handover pack that means anything. See Term 4 — Continuity.

I hold nothing of yours to back up. Code, infrastructure and credentials already sit in your own estate, so restore is your operation on your systems, not a promise I make about mine.

One director and one shareholder is the ordinary shape of a company like this, and it has an ordinary failure mode: on the death of the sole director and shareholder the shares pass through probate, probate takes months, and in those months the company can freeze. Invoices cannot be raised or paid, intellectual property cannot be assigned, and a healthy engagement stalls on a legal formality rather than on anything technical. The fix is already done: a successor director is appointed in advance, with signed instructions and a cross-option agreement, so authority passes without waiting for probate. See Term 4 — Continuity.

Data protection

I am the controller for my own business contacts and the processor for client data handled under an engagement. A DPA, the sub-processor list and the security posture are available on request. I do not store submissions to the form on the Brief page: the message travels through the email provider to one inbox, and exists in no database, object store or log.