Terms of business

Who we are and how to reach us

We are Made By Night Ltd, a web design and technology company registered in England and Wales with company number 17519652. Our registered office is 128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX, and you can reach us at hello@madebynight.co.uk. When these terms say "we" or "us", that is who it means. "You" means the business that asked us for a quote, accepted one, or holds a plan with us.

What these terms cover

Each piece of work we do for you is described in a written quote: what we will build, what it costs, when payment is due and when it will be live. The quote and these terms together are the agreement between us. If the quote and these terms say different things, the quote wins, because it was written for you.

Hosting and care plans are set up for your business at the amount agreed with you. The plan’s name, what it includes and its price are shown in your account before you pay for it.

Quotes

A quote is a fixed price for the work it describes. It does not go up if the work takes us longer than we expected. It is valid until the date printed on it, which is 30 days from the day we send it unless the quote says otherwise.

You accept a quote on its page in our customer app, or by telling us in writing. Accepting starts the project and we issue the deposit invoice straight away.

The deposit and our mockup promise

Love the design or your money back. This is what that means in full:

• A deposit starts the project. We then design mockups of your home page, or your home page plus one product page, and send them to you.
• If none of them is something you love, we refund the deposit in full and part as friends.
• Once you choose a mockup, the build begins and the balance in your quote is due as agreed. Substantial work starts at that point, so the choice is the commitment.
• The website, its code and its assets become yours when the final payment is made.

Paying us

Build work is paid by bank transfer against the invoices we issue, on the schedule in your quote: the deposit when you accept, then the balance in the instalments the quote sets out. Every invoice says when it is due.

Hosting and care plans are paid by card through Stripe, monthly or yearly in advance, from the day you first pay for the plan. You can change your card, download receipts and cancel from your account.

Every quote and invoice states whether VAT is charged and at what rate. Prices are in pounds sterling.

If an invoice is not paid by its due date we will remind you. If it is still unpaid 14 days after that reminder we may pause the work, and for a hosting and care plan we may take the site offline until the plan is paid, after giving you 7 days’ written notice. We may charge interest on late payments at the statutory rate.

What we need from you

• The words, images, logos and other material the site needs, by the dates we agree, and the access we ask for, such as to your domain and any existing accounts.
• Confirmation that you own, or have permission to use, everything you give us. If someone claims otherwise, that is for you to resolve.
• Feedback and approvals within a few working days of each stage. Our dates assume this. If we are waiting on you, the launch date moves by the time we waited.
• Up-to-date legal wording for your own site, such as your privacy notice, terms and returns policy. We place it; you or your solicitor supply it.

Changes to the work

If you ask for something the quote does not include, we will tell you what it costs and how it affects the date before we do it, and we only go ahead once you have agreed in writing. Small changes are often free; we will say when they are not.

Who owns what

The website, its code and its assets become yours when the final payment is made. Until then they are ours and you may use them to review the work. Once they are yours you may do what you like with them, including moving them to another provider.

Three things stay outside that transfer: material you gave us, which was always yours; open-source and third-party components, which come under their own licences; and the general tools and building blocks we use on every project, which stay ours, with a permanent licence for you to keep using them in your site. A Shopify theme runs only on Shopify, and your Shopify account, your products, your customers and your orders are yours from day one.

Where we register a domain for you it is registered in your name, and you are the owner. We never hold a client’s domain in our own name.

Hosting and care plans

A plan covers what its description says: hosting, security and platform updates, fixes when something we built breaks, and the amount of change time it includes each month. Unused change time does not carry over. Work beyond the plan is quoted separately.

We host on Cloudflare’s network and keep backups. We work hard to keep your site up, and we are the ones who answer when it is not, but we cannot promise it will never be interrupted, and we are not responsible for the failure of a service we do not control.

You can cancel a plan at any time from your account. It stops at the end of the period you have paid for and is not charged again; we do not refund part of a period. If you cancel, we give you an export of your site and anything else of yours we hold, and keep a backup for 30 days in case you need it.

We may change a plan’s price with at least 30 days’ written notice. The new price applies from your next payment after the notice period. If you do not want to pay it, cancel before then and the plan ends at the end of the period you have paid for.

Forms, sign-ups and bookings on your site

Your plan can include services that collect information from your own visitors: contact and enquiry forms, newsletter sign-ups, bookings and visit statistics. Each one is an add-on, priced as its own line on your plan, and you can see and export everything it collects from your account. Visit statistics use no cookies and never store a visitor’s IP address.

For that information you are the data controller and we are your processor. These terms are the written agreement UK data protection law requires between us, and we commit to the following.

• We use your visitors’ data only to run the service for you, on your instructions, and never for ourselves or anyone else.
• Everyone at Made By Night who can see it is bound to keep it confidential.
• Each site’s data is kept in its own separate store, so it cannot be mixed with another customer’s.
• Only Cloudflare, which stores it, and Resend, which sends the emails it triggers, receive it. We will give you 30 days’ notice before adding another company, and you can end the add-on if you object.
• We help you answer your visitors when they use their data protection rights, such as asking for a copy of their data or for it to be deleted.
• If a breach affects your visitors’ data we tell you without undue delay, and within 48 hours of knowing, with what we know, so you can meet your own duty to report it.
• Form submissions are kept for 12 months unless you choose a different period, newsletter sign-ups until the person unsubscribes and for 30 days after, so you can take them off your own mailing list, bookings for 12 months after the appointment, and visit statistics for 3 months.
• When an add-on ends we give you an export, then delete the data within 30 days.
• We give you the information you need to show the law is being followed. Ask at hello@madebynight.co.uk.

Results

We do our work with reasonable skill and care, and we tell you honestly what we think will help. We do not promise sales, enquiries, visitor numbers or search rankings, because they depend on things neither of us controls.

Showing our work

We may show the site we built for you in our portfolio and case studies, with your business name and screenshots. Tell us in writing if you would rather we did not, and we will take it down from anything we publish after that. We never publish anything you have told us is confidential.

Confidentiality

Each of us keeps the other’s confidential information private and uses it only for the work, unless the law requires otherwise.

Acceptable use

Sites we host must not be used for anything unlawful, for sending unsolicited bulk email, for malware, or for anything that harms other people or the service other customers rely on. If that happens we may suspend the site, and we will tell you why.

Our liability

If we get something wrong, we put it right. Beyond that, our total liability to you for any project or plan is limited to the amount you paid us for it in the 12 months before the claim. We are not liable for loss of profit, business or data, or for indirect losses.

Nothing in these terms limits liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not allow to be limited.

Ending the agreement

You can stop a project at any time by telling us in writing. The mockup promise above decides what happens to the deposit. Once you have chosen a mockup, work done up to the day you stop is billed as set out in your quote, and anything we have built is handed over when that is paid.

Either of us can end a hosting and care plan with 30 days’ written notice. We can also end a plan or project if an invoice stays unpaid after the notice in the paying section, or if the acceptable use rules are broken.

Your data

How we handle personal data, who we share it with and what rights you have are set out in our privacy notice, which is part of these terms.

Changes to these terms

We may update these terms. The date at the top says when they last changed. A change affects a project from the next quote we send you, and a plan from 30 days after we email you about it. If you do not accept a change to a plan, cancel it before the change takes effect.

The law that applies

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and the courts of England and Wales deal with any dispute. They are written for businesses. If you are buying as a consumer, nothing here takes away the rights the law gives you.